Product Description

Read by millions of students over seven editions, The Norton Anthology of English Literature remains the most trusted undergraduate survey of English literature available and one of the most successful college texts ever published. Firmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies—thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible—The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones. Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool. .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62553 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 3072 pages

About the Author
Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Alfred David (Ph.D. Harvard) is Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University. He is the author of The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry, and editor of the "Romaunt of the Rose" in The Riverside Chaucer and, with George B. Pace, "Chaucer’s Minor Poems I" in The Variorum Chaucer. He is the recipient of a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship and Guggenheim and Fulbright Research fellowships and past president of the New Chaucer Society.


Barbara K. Lewalski (Ph.D. Chicago) is William R. Kenan Professor of English and of History and Literature at Harvard University. She is the recipient of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric and the Explicator Prize for Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise. Her other books include Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, Writing Women in Jacobean England, Milton: A Critical Biography, and The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght (editor). Lewalski is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEH Senior fellowships and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Honored Scholar of the Milton Society.

Lawrence Lipking (Ph.D. Cornell) is Professor of English and Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for The Life of the Poet. He is also the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, and Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author and editor of High Romantic Argument. Lipking is the recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, Newberry Library, Wilson International Center for Scholars, and NEH Senior fellowships and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

George M. Logan (Ph.D. Harvard) is James Cappon Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada, where he is former head of the English Department and winner of the W. J. Barnes Teaching Excellence Award. He is the author of The Meaning of More’s Utopia and principal editor of the standard edition of Utopia, editor of More’s History of King Richard the Third, and coeditor of Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance.

Katharine Eisaman Maus (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins) is James Branch Cabell Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She received the Roland Bainton Book Prize for Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. She is also the author of Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind; editor of a volume of Renaissance revenge tragedies; and coeditor of English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and a collection of criticism on seventeenth-century English poetry. She is a recipient of Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS, and Leverhulme fellowships.

James Noggle (Ph.D. Berkeley) is Associate Professor of English and Whitehead Associate Professor of Critical Thought at Wellesley College. He is the author of The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists and is at work on a study of taste and temporality in eighteenth-century British discourse. He is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society.

James Simpson (Ph.D. Cambridge) is Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University and former Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. An Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is the author of Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry, and Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547, Volume 2 of The Oxford English Literary History.

Customer Reviews

Ahh! Get a cup of tea, find a cozy spot, and settle in...
If you're a book lover, how can you not love a book like this? It was my required reading for a literature class, and I was all too happy to have an excuse to buy it. Satisfyingly fat at 3000 pages, it exudes that delicious book smell when you flip through it, and its matte-sheen cover feels good in your hands and protects its sizable contents quite well.

For me, this was worth getting just for Seamus Heaney's wonderful translation of Beowulf. You can smell the ocean and hear the armor clank as this readable version places you right there in the sixth century. Along with the usual excerpts from such works as the Canterbury Tales, you get complete versions of King Lear, Twelfth Night, Utopia, and Paradise Lost. After looking over the excerpts from Gulliver's Travels, it appears that sections 1,2, and 4 are presented complete, with only some material edited from section 3, so you get almost all of that, too. The footnotes for this, and all the other works, are enormously useful.

I have a few gripes about the book, however these don't merit the subtraction of a star in the rating. First - this book is SO heavy. Obviously there was no way around this in publishing, because to put this many pages on good-quality paper the laws of physics are working against you. But I have literally suffered backache from bringing it around with me in my book bag, and have had to sorrowfully leave it at home at times because of this. Second, I wish it included a clear list of which major works are presented complete, for those of us who want to make sure to read the whole thing. My final beef is with the editorial introduction to The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale from the Canterbury Tales. Reading this rant about "antifeminist writings" was like stepping from the high halls of classic academia into the junior-college classroom of some washed-up 1970s holdover. I HATE agenda in my education, and in my opinion, applying 20th century (yes, 20th) sentiments to 14th century literature is anachronistic and inappropriate. But such is the state of education these days, and here is your evidence in a volume that should have known better. However, that has been the only thing I have come upon that irritated me.

Buying this book is a great way to get a bunch of classics all at once, and there is so much to it that you can enjoy a long read or a short read anytime you want, once you find a way to work around its mass. I look forward to the years of reading pleasure I'll get from my copy.

Excellent Learning Tool
The Norton series of anthologies never fails to disappoint, and this is proof that they're not about to. A hefty book, it delivers on its' promise; from cover to cover it is full poems and prose from the Middle Ages clean through to the Eighteenth Century. On (nearly) every author there is a detailed biography, helpful to get inside the mind of the writer and understand where they're coming from. A nice feature is the inclusion of full-length texts. From shorter plays, as Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus" through two complete Shakespeare's (whether you believe he wrote them or not :) )and even all the books of Paradise Lost-- and that's just in one time period. Included in the middle are colour plates of a smattering of different items, and while not necessarily critical to the enjoyment or usefulness of the Anthology, it's certainly a nice touch -- a way to give the eyes a break after digesting a few hundred lines of poetry.

Overall, great, both for the student reading through it for a Humanities course to the Accomplished professional reading through on a quiet evening.

4 Stars
I would have given this anthology 5 stars were it not for one small problem. It is paperback and it is extremely large. This is quite literally enough material to have split up into two separate volumes. It is available hardbound and, had I been offered that option at checkout, I would have preferred it.