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Title: shoddy
Review: One would expect more from Harold Bloom, whose superb 'Shakespeare Invention of the Human' is such a marvellous collection of essays. While I appreciate the task of being an editor is different, I'm astonished that Prof. Bloom cannot find one piece of Tolkien criticism written more recently than 1983! Before today's college freshmen were born...!Perhaps this book was a little hastily thrown together, but I can't help feeling that serious students of Tolkien will feel ripped off--and better off going to their college library for current critical studies. I fully expected to see, for example, a selection from Norman Cantor's superb "Inventing the Middle Ages", whose chapter on Tolkien gives an historian's interesting perspective on why, contra Bloom, the Lord of the Rings will take its place in the pantheon of great works of the 20th century ("aesthetic reservations" be damned).Anyway, its the lack of recent pieces like Cantor's that makes Prof. Bloom's book such a disappointment....
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