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THERE IS ONE major shortcoming with publications like the Australian Book Review or the New York Review of Books--their reviews are very largely for new books or new editions, not for new readers. And yet, for every new generation, there lies in wait of discovery that treasure chest of inestimable value which we simply call "great literature" or "the classics". While many are republished regularly in new editions, many more are not.
In the West, this collection of great literature has been called, in his book of that name, The Western Canon by Harold Bloom (1994). And we know what he means by this term. The literature in question defines what it means to be human ...