Of Influence has been published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice, and is edited by Lewis Roberts, Jacob Ridley (Oxford), and Roddy Howland Jackson (Oxford). Born of an international conference held in Oxford in 2023, 50 years after Harold Bloom published The Anxiety of Influence, these essays ask what Bloom can do for us today. The essays range from revisionary theoretical accounts of translation or familial bonds as forms of influence, to structures of literary studies beyond Bloom’s sphere of interest such as Chinua Achebe’s pre-eminence in the African canon. Beginning with one of the world’s most celebrated psychoanalysts, Adam Phillips, considering Sigmund Freud’s unmatched influence on Bloom himself, the volume also includes a number of essays by members of the Cambridge English Faculty: Victoria Baena, Mina Gorji, and Eliza Haughton-Shaw.

The volume is available here and is open access: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/39/9?nav=tocList

The full list of contributors and titles is as follows:

Of Influence, edited by Lewis Roberts, Jacob Ridley, and Roddy Howland Jackson

• ‘Anxiety Again’, by Ridley, Roberts, and Howland Jackson
• ‘Bloom’s Freud and Bloom’s Anxiety’, by Adam Phillips
• ‘“Our idea of distortion”: Misprision between Bloom and Ashbery’, by William Burns
• ‘The Translator’s Task: Influence beyond the Monolingual Paradigm’, by Victoria Baena
• ‘Listening as Influence’, by Mina Gorji
• ‘“The set is now broken”: Sibling Influence in the Work of Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth’, by Eliza Haughton-Shaw
• ‘Specters of the District Commissioner: the Negotiation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in Contemporary African Historical Fiction’, by Hannah Fagan
• ‘Inimitability’, by Beci Carver