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In 1994, Harold Bloom published The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, a survey of the Western canon, the major literary works of post-Roman Europe. Besides analyses of the canon's various representative writers (Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa, Beckett), the major concern of the volume is reclaiming literature from those he refers to as the "School of resentment", the mostly academic critics who espouse a social purpose in reading.

Bloom believes that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the "forces of resentments'" goal: improvement of one's society, which he casts as an absurd aim, writing "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position, stated simply, is that politics have no place in literary criticism: a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet, for example, would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but nothing about Hamlet itself, it being so universal.

In addition to the amount of influence one writer has had on later writers, Bloom introduces the concept of "canonical strangeness" as a benchmark of a literary work's merit. The Western Canon also included a list—which aroused more widespread interest than anything else in the volume—of all the Western works from antiquity to the present which Bloom considered either as permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or (among more recent works) as candidates for that status. The notoriety surrounding The Western Canon turned Bloom into something of a celebrity.