What it did instead was make a pointed argument about how Chaucer is anthologized by exploring what biases trend through the decades of republication of The
Norton Anthology of English Literature. Four years later, Claire cheered me on as I worked my way through a dissertation on Early Modern Print Culture that quoted title pages, dedicatory sonnets, and letters to readers rather than epic poems or oft-read plays.
Across nine editions and fifty turbulent years of literary studies, The
Norton Anthology of English Literature has maintained a consistent if mildly contradictory philosophy of annotation.
(Abrams is also still publishing: In August, Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) Abrams' name will be familiar to just about every English major of the last half-century, if only because it appears at the top of the spine of each edition of the
Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams created in 1962.
(1.) Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur," The
Norton Anthology of English Literature. Seventh Edition.
[1] Because of the audience for this article, all quotations from Malory are taken from the
Norton Anthology of English Literature. The standard edition of Malory's work is The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed.
He coedited the most recent Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and the twentieth-century volume of The
Norton Anthology of English Literature.
It's called the
Norton Anthology of English Literature.
But both the
Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Longman Anthology of British Literature are just as surely creatures of immensity.
Texts include the Prentice Hall Concise Anthology of American Literature, and, most often, the latest edition of the
Norton Anthology of English Literature. Regarding all these texts recalls for me an old dream: to consider canon formation as it abides not in the United States or England but in the rest of the world.
The editors of the
Norton Anthology of English Literature write that the poets of the two world wars strove to warn about official lies and human beings' inhumanity toward each other by disclosing the realities of war.
Stephen Owen's translation (apart from about three works out of hundreds) and selection of Chinese literature follows the pattern of the
Norton Anthology of English literature and aims at being informative, with historical and literary introductions to the extracts.