Norton, the David and Goliath of the anthology publishing world, has been cast. Of this relationship, Joyce Jensen of the " New York Times" wrote in 1999, "The first stone in the war between Longman and W. "The Longman Anthology of British Literature" is also a competitor. Bloom, a former student of Abrams’, noted, “We were defeated in battle.” ] The seventies saw the emergence of Pearson’s "The Oxford Anthology of English Literature," edited by Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling. I always claimed he had the better, not of the argument, but of the rhetoric of the argument." ] Another addition has been an increase in women writers: "The new edition, Greenblatt said, includes 68 women writers, more than eight times as many as in the first edition." ] "He always claimed that I bent his sword. The two had first met in the 80's, when they once delivered opposing lectures. Greenblatt joined the editorial team during the 1990s: "When Norton asked Greenblatt - who was already editor of "The Norton Shakespeare" - to join the team as Abrams's deputy in the mid-90's, Abrams said he was initially skeptical because of their different critical approaches, but quickly came around. This edition also saw the addition of a piece of edible "snack paper" between pages 752 and 753 for hungry late-night studiers. The Seventh edition added Seamus Heaney’s translation of “ Beowulf,” Shakespeare’s " Twelfth Night", and Chinua Achebe’s novel " Things Fall Apart". The sixth edition, published in 1993, included Nadine Gordimer and Fleur Adcock.
The fifth edition in 1986 included the addition of the full texts of Joyce’s “The Dead” and Conrad’s " Heart of Darkness". The anthology underwent periodic revisions every few years. Published in 1962, the first edition of The Norton Anthology was based on an English literature survey course Abrams and fellow editor David Daiches taught at Cornell University. 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". Within this structure, the anthology incorporates a number of thematically linked "clusters" of texts pertaining to significant contemporary concerns.
Historical and biographical information is provided in a series of headnotes for each author and in introductions for each of the time periods. 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. The eighth edition of "The Norton Anthology of English Literature" comprises six volumes, sold in two sets of three. Spread across six volumes and divided into two sets, the anthology provides an overview of poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays, letters from " Beowulf" to the 21st century. Abrams, served as General Editor for the first seven editions of the anthology before handing the job to Stephen Greenblatt, a renowned Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor. ] The influential critic and scholar of Romanticism, M.H. It has gone through eight editions since its inception in 1962 it is the publisher’s best-selling anthology, with some eight million copies in print.
"The Norton Anthology of English Literature" is an anthology of English literature published by the W.