Anxiety about impact

Author: Bloom (USA), translated by Xu Wenbo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-02-01
Features: This book examines the influence of poets on one another from the perspective of psychoanalysis. The author argues that classics establish an unattainable height, and the history of poetry is shaped by successive generations of poets misinterpreting their predecessors. By employing Freud's theory of the family romance, Nietzsche's theory of the will to power, and Paul de Man's theory of textual misreading, the author explores the anxiety of traditional influence and proposes a unique theory called "the misreading of poetry" – "reversal criticism." Since its publication in the United States in 1973, the book has garnered significant attention from European literary critics. Some Western scholars have remarked that Bloom, with a "thin book," "shook everyone's nerves."