The Fourth Age (Chaotic) of Harold Blooms Canon (Part 5)
Explore Harold Bloom's chaotic Fourth Age canon with essential works like Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Rudyard Kipling's Kim, plus rare picks—a curated literary journey through fiction and juvenile classics.
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The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life. As Alexander Theroux asserts in his Introduction, Hardy was "committed to the deep expression of [nature's] ironic chaos and strange apathy, even hostility, toward man."
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
There's a tale that goes around even now regarding Thomas Hardy -- that is, that the reaction of readers to one of his novels was so intense -- and so disturbing! -- that he swore off novels and spent the rest of his life committing poetry. Well, the story is true, the way it happens and this is the book responsible: Jude the Obscure.
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Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
Kim, an Irish orphan, accompanies a holy man on his journey throughout India and his quest for a mystical river.
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Collected Stories of Rudyard Kipling
by Rudyard Kipling
As a young writer living in Lahore during the time of the British Raj, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was possessed by an enormous subject—India—and his genius for rendering its beauty and strangeness was even then so fully formed that we have to look to the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens to find writers equally precocious. What is even more astonishing, and what this selection of stories from across his entire career reveals, is the way that his talent grew and developed over time. The work he did toward the end of his long writing life is even better than that which marked its splendid beginnings. The forty stories collected here range across a surprising variety of subjects and techniques. Here are his superb war stories, “Mary Postgate,” “The Gardener,” and “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” as well as his famous forays into horror in “The Mark of the Beast,” science fiction in “With the Night Mail,” and the ghost story in “The House Surgeon.” “The Man Who Would Be King” is an unforgettable adventure tale, “‘Love-o’-Women’” and “Without Benefit of Clergy” reveal his insight into love and passion, and “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” is a searing revisiting of Kipling’s childhood trauma. From the nightmarish allegory of “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” and the mystical visions in “The Bridge-Builders” to the brilliant portrait of obsession and sacrifice in his masterpiece, “The Wish House,” these stories showcase Kipling’s remarkable narrative gifts.
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The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
Penguin inaugurates a series of revised editions of Conrad's finest works, with new introductions In a corrupt London underworld of criminals, terrorists, and fanatics, Mr. Verloc is assigned to plant a bomb. The tragic repercussions for his family show how Conrad's ironic voice is concerned not with politics but with the terrible fates of ordinary people.
