Taken together, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition.

Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor's note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliogaraphy, a chronology of the writer's life and works, and notes on the contributors. Thus the comedy affords no romantic release from law's domain into the realm of love.Instead, the play.celebrates not the characters' warm embrace of mutual identity, as in marriage, but their cold preservation or augmentation of what they legally own-Grace Tiffany Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations, a series of more than 100 volumes, presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels, and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and The Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo's White Noise. In this one play alone, Shakespeare was very much of his age and not for all time.-Harold Bloom Only in The Merchant of Venice are conflicts resolved through adherence to law rather than by law's suspension. To stage the play of Antonio, Portia, and Shylock now is to attempt what is virtually impossible, since only an audience at ease with its own anti-Semitism could tolerate a responsible and authentic presentation of what Shakespeare actually wrote. This new edition, featuring an introduction by Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom, presents a selection of full-length essays offering a range of critical responses to this influential and enduring work. Yet the play, with its highly debated portrayal of the moneylender Shylock, resists easy categorization, incorporating elements of tragedy and romance in equal portion. It seemingly adopts the framework of a traditional comedy in which young lovers triumph over their restrictive elders. The Merchant of Venice is a richly complicated and, to some, a deeply disturbing work. Harold Bloom, the Yale University eminence who died in 2019 at age 89, was the most famous, most prolific, and to use the apt word most influential literary critic in America from the time he published The Anxiety of Influence in 1973.

Harold bloom merchant of venice