The famous Yale literary critic Harold Bloom passed away earlier this week.  I did not know the man, and will leave it to others to mark his passing or offer reflections on the sum of his life. But as a historical subject, Bloom is familiar to me; his interventions about “the canon” are of course part of the debates I’m focused on. But I’m not primarily interested in what Bloom had to say about “the Western canon” in the 1980s and 1990s. I’m much more interested in some of his earliest published writing on the composition of “the” canon. Here Read more