西方正典

A. The Theocratic Age: 2000 BCE-1321 CE 神权时代：公元前2000 – 公元1321
B. The Aristocratic Age: 1321-1832 贵族时代：公元1321 - 公元1832
C. The Democratic Age: 1832-1900 民主时代：公元1832 – 公元1900
D. The Chaotic Age: 20th Century 混乱时代：20世纪

以上的哈樂德認為的世界觀。

A. The Theocratic Age神权时代
"Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran....
"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us."
(Bloom, p. 531)


B. The Aristocratic Age贵族时代
"It is a span of five hundred years from Dante's Divine Comedy through Goethe's Faust, Part Two [1321-1832], an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted...." (Bloom, p. 534)


C. The Democratic Age民主时代
"I have located Vico's Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength of both Russian and American literature begins."(Bloom, p. 540)

D. The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy混乱时代：预言经典
"I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug's game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical; literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind."(Bloom, p. 548)