How long does it take to read The Western Canon?
the books and school of the ages
The Western Canon by Harold Bloom takes about 10 hours 18 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 18 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1994. 562 pages, about 154,550 words.
21 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 17 hours 10 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 18 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 26 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of the aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights poets or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. Bloom concludes this provocative, trenchant work with a complete list of essential writers and books - his vision of the Canon.
Subjects: Canon (Literature), History and criticism, Religious aspects, Littérature, Literatura, Letterkunde
