Customer Reviews

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 (Packaged with Media Companion)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had to buy this book for two of my English Literature survey courses. I'm sure that most people who buy this volume do the same--they buy it because they have to. Still, it is an excellent volume and a very thorough survey of English Literature, from the middle ages on down to the nineteenth century.

Highlights from this volume include Seamus Heaney's exceptional translation of Beowulf (in its entirety), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, many selections from the Canterbury Tales, lots of Shakespeare, and Milton's masterpiece Paradise Lost, reprinted in full.

As I said before, many who buy this volume will do so because they have to. Still, I think most people will find this anthology to be one they will not be selling back at the end of the semester. I know I'll definitely be keeping mine. This is a great place to start a study of English Literature.

For some as-yet unknown reason, I feel compelled to defend the Norton Anthology against the various charges being brought against it here. So far, it's been accused of being a tool for "academically lazy" professors, [essentially] a superfluous moneygrubbing update, and something which (somehow) renders authors "boring." Another person feels that it's too poetry- and essay-heavy to be representative of the covered periods.

I'll confess that I don't really understand these accusations. It is both what it looks like and what it claims to be: 3,000 pages with as much bang for your literary buck as is possible. The only novels included are those which are exceedingly important and/or representative of a period... which is as it should be.

And frequent updates (which take place every few years -- hardly a serious issue for most people) are absolutely necessary. A static canon would be boring, and likely would leave scholars with nothing to do. I, for one, am happy with the authors added in the seventh edition. <shrug>

It's an outstanding introduction to two centuries of English lit.

I'm a university professor who has taught the _Norton Anthology_ for years, and bought it this year with high hopes for the new edition. I was greatly disappointed to see that all that seems to have happened was more and more was added and little was taken away--the book has long since gone past being ridiculously oversized, and while the expansion of the canon can be commended insofar as now many female writers and writers of color have been added, there should have been some omissions to balance the extra page length. Do students in an introductory survey really need Walter Savage Landor, Arthur Hugh Clough, or Ernest Dowson? And even if they are one teacher's personal favorite, might they not then be photocopied by that particular teacher to add to her or his class?

The headnotes and historical introductions are also much too lengthy to be of much use to students coming to this material for the first time. Finally, the inclusion of _Things Fall Apart_ to this edition was a very poor choice: while a work by a novelist of color was greatly appreciated, a shorter work more oriented towards the problems of the British postcolonialism per se (such as Naipaul's _In a Free State_ ) would have been much more useful than Achebe's overassigned novel.

This second volume of the NAEL covers the expanse of the Romantic Period, the Victorian Age and the 20th Century (or Modern Period). While I did have to get this book for a survey course, I was pleasantly suprised at the vast range of work represented in the text.

Not only does the book include "Cannonical" writers but also more obscure writers that may not be as well known now but were popular during their timeframe. The text has an equal amount of work represented from both women and men and explains the viewpoint of each in relation to what was going on at the time. An example are the women Romantic writers; they viewed things differently than their male counterparts and therefore wrote about different things, had different styles of writing, etc.

Of course, as with all Norton books, there are bios of each author before their selections, introductions to each period, apendicies, bibliographies, essays and a section of goegraphic nomenclature. The book is well formated, foot-noted (not end-noted =)), and the selections are marvelous. Anyone well versed in English literature should have this book on their shelves.

Ninety-nine percent of the people who buy this book will have no choice; it will be the required text for an undergraduate survey of British literature. They should know that while this is in many respects a fine book, it is misleading. I will offer a couple of examples based on my own specialization, 19th century literature.

The two volumes offer 15 pages on Sir Walter Scott, that is, 1/400th of the whole anthology, or 1/200th of the second volume. Yet Scott is, arguably, the most influential writer in English for the 19th century. No Scott - - no historical novel - - no War and Peace. The volume's ill-treatment of Scott extends to the selection of Scott's prose, namely the first chapter of The Heart of Midlothian. The story proper does not begin till chapter 2. I would advise a reader new to Scott to skip Chapter 1. What about printing one of Scott's short stories instead, "The Highland Widow" or "The Two Drovers"? If an excerpt must be used, what about the climax of Redgauntlet, with the dismissal of Bonnie Prince Charlie?

The editors and/or publishers have prepared a book they think will _sell lots of copies_. Be warned that this has dictated some distortions. Giving three times the space to Mary Wollstonecraft as to Scott is an example. No doubt Wollstonecraft is important for understanding the currents of sensibility of the age and the voice that feminists did have; but then, where are the hymns of Charles Wesley, taken up by innumerable British people? You need to know something about them if you are to understand the period. Leaving them out really does the reader a disservice.

Users of this book get an anthology that subtly distorts one's picture of the eras through which the selections move. Good luck to its users.

I don't remember a time when I enjoyed reading a book so much in class and at home. I share these poems with my friends a family. Don't let the size scare you, it's enjoyable material and they usually don't ask you to read everything!

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 / 0-393-95043-3

If you are looking at purchasing this book, you've either been required to purchase it for a college course, or you are considering investing in an English literature anthology for your own library and you want to know if this anthology is worth your money. If you are required to buy this book for a course, my review won't matter to you much one way or another, so this is slated towards the latter group.

This is an excellent resource for English literature selections and excerpts. A good deal of the selections are poetry or lyrical selections; most of the prose selections are small excerpts meant only to give you the "feel" of the author's writing style. Invest in a copy if you have any interest in English literature (particularly poetry) and you won't be sorry. The authors and contents represented include:

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
- William Blake
- Robert Burns
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- William Wordsworth
- Dorothy Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Charles Lamb
- William Hazlitt
- Thomas de Quincey
- George Gordon, Lord Byron
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- John Keats
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- William Lisle Bowles
- Sir Walter Scott
- Robert Southey
- Walter Savage Landor
- Thomas Moore
- Leigh Hunt
- Thomas Love Peacock
- John Clare
- George Darley
- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

THE VICTORIAN AGE
- Thomas Carlyle
- John Henry Cardinal Newman
- John Stuart Mill
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Edward Fitzgerald
- Robert Browning
- Emily Bronte
- John Ruskin
- Arthur Hugh Clough
- Matthew Arnold
- Thomas Henry Huxley
- George Meredith
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- Christina Rossetti
- William Morris
- Algernon Charles Swinburne
- Walter Pater
- Edward Lear
- Lewis Carroll
- W. S. Gilbert
- Charles Darwin
- John Tyndall
- Leonard Huxley
- Sir Edmund Gosse
- Thomas Babington Macaulay
- Friedrich Engels
- Charles Kingsley
- Charles Dickens
- Herbert Spencer
- Sarah Stickney Ellis
- George Eliot
- Dinah Maria Mulock
- Florence Nightingale
- Walter Besant
- William Ernest Henley
- Oscar Wilde
- Francis Thompson
- Rudyard Kipling
- Ernest Dowson

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- Thomas Hardy
- Gerald Manley Hopkins
- Bernard Shaw
- Joseph Conrad
- A. E. Housman
- Rupert Brooke
- Edward Thomas
- Siegfried Sassoon
- Ivor Gurney
- Isaac Rosenberg
- Wilfred Owen
- David Jones
- William Butler Yeats
- Virginia Woolf
- James Joyce
- D. H. Lawrence
- Edwin Muir
- Edith Sitwell
- T. S. Eliot
- Katherine Mansfield
- Hugh MacDiarmid
- Robert Graves
- F. R. Leavis
- Stevie Smith
- George Orwell
- Samuel Beckett
- W. H. Auden
- Louis MacNeice
- Dylan Thomas
- Doris Lessing
- Harold Pinter
- Donald Dave
- Philip Larkin
- Molly Holden
- Thom Gunn
- Ted Hughes
- Jon Silkin
- Elaine Feinstein
- Geoffrey Hill
- Seamus Heaney

~ Ana Mardoll

Most of the reviews submitted thus far tend to criticize the canon in general, as opposed to the editorial apparatus or the actual works contained within this tome. I for one am delighted with this book, and have found no logical substitute for it as of yet. Even when looking into the "Longman Anthology of British Literature" I found it considerably lacking. To deny the whole of "Paradise Lost" is inane (and yes, to include the work completely is neccessary if one is to truly appeciate it; without it the entire work, you might as well not include any of it at all) and to only offer one Shakesperean play is akin more to a meal, than a banquet (if I may sardonically quote their marketing ploy on the back of the Longman) - truly, the Norton is THE book for any English Literature survey course.

Since this is a book you will want to have around for a lifetime, because you will want to refer to it over and over, why not get the hardback version? Believe it or not, it only costs a buck and a quarter extra!

If I were stranded for several years in The Arctic, and could chose only one source of entertainment/education/diversion to keep my spirits up, it would be The Norton Anthology, 6th edition. This book is my bible - I have owned it for over ten years and have never tired of picking it up - never run out of new ideas to discover or new writers to appreciate.

The scope of the work, like all the Norton Anthologies, is astounding. The standard of the editing is flawless and the discerning selection of writers and their titles make a powerful statement about the editors collective fluency with the subject matter. And what a subject it is!

The English Romantic period is without question, I think, the high-water mark of literature since the classical age, and within this single volume we find the best poetical, and many of the best short-prose works of every major contributor to that great heritage - along with the contributions of the somewhat lesser, yet still powerful, Victorians.

The titanic eruditian of Shelley, The unequaled depth and sensitivity of Keats, the rapior-wit of Oscar Wilde - it's all here and more; enough to keep you reading, literally, for years! Not only is it a sheer pleasure to look forward to a book like this, but if you ever find yourself really finished with it you will have emerged a finer person. Not a bad deal for ten or twenty bucks when you think about it!