Anxiety of Influence

One of the most discussed and quoted classic works in the field of literary theory is in Turkish after a longer time. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom develops a very original and much-discussed theory about the "Oedipal" relationship between the individual artist and his predecessors, about "how one poet helps another poet to be born", mainly through the Romantic poets.

In the preface he added to the book in 1997, Bloom explains how Shakespeare, whom he sees as the greatest of all poets and even "the one who invented man" in the modern sense, creatively overcame his fear of being influenced by his predecessor Marlowe. While doing this, he enters into a harsh polemic with today's radical-political critics, whom he calls the "School of Ressentiment" because he thinks they are trying to reduce great literary figures such as Shakespeare to their social conditions. We are sure that this preface will be read with as much interest as the book itself.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: American critic. He was born in New York in 1930. He entered the Department of English Literature at Cornell University in 1947 and became a student of MH Abrams, who was known especially for his works on Romanticism. After graduating from this school, he continued his education at Pembroke College for a year and then at Yale University. He still teaches courses in the field of Humanities at this university, where he has been working as a faculty member since 1955. An extremely productive and diligent critic, Bloom has written around thirty books, several of them in the field of fiction, and edited hundreds of books since his first book, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), was published in 1959.



Number of Pages: 184

Year of Printing: 2008


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Metis Publishing

First Print Year: 2008

Number of Pages: 184

Language Turkish