Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

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After Beckett's death in 1989 Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon. "I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time" he said many years later. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca New York.

These theories dominated his writing for a decade after which he began to focus on what he named "religious criticism" in books such as The Book of J (1990) and The American Religion (1992). He has edited hundreds of anthologies for the Chelsea House publishing firm.