The Unsettling Legacy of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence

Harold Bloom's idiosyncratic poetic history is a perdurable cultural force with implications for our present, not just for Bloom's. His story of influence, his attention to the cultural and historical imaginary of “Europe,” can thus lend itself to postcolonial contexts equally concerned to trace how this imaginary insists and persists at our behest and against our political will. This essay produces a provocative constellation of Bloom's unlikely and unquiet heirs on the contemporary critical scene who would open his kingdom of culture to the sufferings of history and to those who have been denied a place in it.