Jane Austen's Emma

by Harold Bloom (Editor)

-- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature
-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism
-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Jane Austen

150 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Reviews

[Ygraine]

maaja stewart's chapter on the fools in austen's emma particularly beautiful in its clarity & grace; barbara thaden's figure and ground: the receding heroine in jane austen's emma particularly painful to my embarrassingly earnest feelings abt this novel but v strong; juliet mcmaster's emma: the geography of a mind particularly engaging & warm in voice, reminded me of a v beloved lecturer.

(the less said abt bloom's introduction, the better, probably?)

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Jane Austen's Emma together with many critical articles downloaded from the Internet this past summer, before going to see the musical version at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Since then, as I work on the endless task of unpacking boxes of books in my garage, I found I had this older collection of critical articles. It contains nine articles written in various journals or as chapters of books between 1973 and 1985, as well as a pretentious introduction by Bloom (as always) and a bibliography of books and articles about Jane Austen. The articles were very uneven; some were very insightful and others (mostly the latest in date) were just academic posturing and "theory".

[Maggie]

The Closure of Emma - John Hagan
"To appreciate fully the ironical significance of his jealousy, prejudice, and recantation vis-a-vis Frank, we also have o see how closely parallel they are to the pattern of Emma's earlier feelings toward Jane Fairfax in volume 2, chapters 8 - 16." (28)
"impossible to see" Knightley as "anything but delightfully human." (35)

Emma and the Charms of Imagination - Susan Morgan
"without her imagination acting upon it, the world would be a bore." (71)
Imagination as "the act of directly seeing into the consciousness of someone else" (89)
"The process of understanding through the immediacy of experience supersedes judgment as a moral act." (89)

Jan Fergus - A Comedy of Intimacy
Passage of Mrs W and K (40) - "This passage . . . bears an ironic relation to almost all of the plot." (103)
"Austen guards against the reader's anticipating the conclusion too soon by allowing Mr Knightley thus to ignore the possibility that he could be Emma's suitor; the reader is made more likely to ignore it also. (104-5)
"The incongruity between what he acknowledges to himself and what he really feels, between so much open and so much concealed affection, is intensely moving." (106)

Gossip Patricia Meyer Spacks
"that gossip, "female talk" provides a mode of power, of undermining public rigidities and asserting private integrity, of discovering means of agency for women, those private citizens deprived of public function." 117