I. PREFATORY REMARKS

Literary theorist Harold Bloom writes in Anxiety of
Influence (1973):

Self-appropriation involves the immense
anxieties of indebtedness-- for what strong
maker desires the realization that he has failed
to create himself?

With all due respect, Mr. Bloom demonstrates an
amnesia qua one of the century's most enduring
literary subgenres, the Prep Coming-of-Age Novel.
In this essay I will attempt a description of the
species, as well as a few of its habits and
affinities, and so forth.

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