The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Cover of eighth edition
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| Country | United States |
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| Language | English |
| Genre | Anthology, English literature |
| Published | 1962 |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by the W. W. Norton & Company. First published in 1962, it has gone through nine editions in a half-century; as of 2006 there are over eight million copies in print, making it the publisher's best-selling anthology.M. H. Abrams, a critic and scholar of Romanticism, served as General Editor for its first seven editions, before handing the job to Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor. The anthology provides an overview of poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays, and letters from Beowulf to the beginning of the 21st century.
The first edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, printed in 1962, comprised two volumes. Also printed in 1962 was a single-volume derivative edition, called the The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major Authors Edition, which contained reprintings with some additions and changes including 28 of the major authors appearing in the original edition.
The eighth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature comprises six volumes, sold in two sets of three. The first set includes the volumes “The Middle Ages,” “The Sixteenth Century and The Early Seventeenth Century,” and “Restoration and the Eighteenth Century;” the second set includes “The Romantic Period,” “The Victorian Age,” and “The Twentieth Century and After.” The writings are arranged by author, with each author presented chronologically by date of birth. Historical and biographical information is provided in a series of headnotes for each author and in introductions for each of the time periods.
Within this structure, the anthology incorporates a number of thematically linked "clusters" of texts pertaining to significant contemporary concerns. For example, "The Sixteenth Century and The Early Seventeenth Century" contains four such clusters under the headings, "Literature of The Sacred," "The Wider World," "The Science of Self and World," and "Voices of the War." The first of these includes four contemporary English translations of an identical passage from the Bible, those of William Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims Version, and the Authorized (King James) Version; selections from the writings of influential Protestant thinkers of the period, including Tyndale, John Calvin, Anne Askew, John Foxe and Richard Hooker; as well as selections from the Book of Common Prayer and the Book of Homilies.
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