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Harold Bloom |
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In 1973 a small book was published under the title, The Anxiety of Influence. It was to mark Harold Bloom's dramatic entrance into literary theory and was to mark as well the theoretical discourse of our century. Since the publication of this book, it has been impossible to discuss theories of influence and tradition without reference to Bloom. Before The Anxiety of Influence twentieth-century criticism had been guided by Matthew Arnold's humanistic vision of tradition, subscribed to by T. S. Eliot and sustained by the pedagogical techniques of the New Criticism. Tradition was viewed as a gathering up, an addition without loss. In The Anxiety of Influence Bloom proposed a radical revision of the concepts of tradition and influence, which he termed "antithetical criticism." This criticism transformed the conventional landscape of literary history into a battleground in which each poet, coming late upon the scene, enters into what might seem to be an Oedipal struggle with his precursors.
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