The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Trusted Editorial Apparatus

Norton Anthologies set the standard for editorial help that is right for undergraduate readers. The Eighth Edition demonstrates why this is so. Through the collaboration of new and seasoned editors, all apparatus has been freshly considered—period introductions and headnotes judiciously recast, thousands of annotations and glosses fine-tuned, timelines and bibliographies carefully updated, and appendixes and maps reconceived and rewritten—all with the goal of making these aids to reading and understanding as helpful as possible.

Complete Works

With each edition, the Norton Anthology has offered a broadened canon without sacrificing the complete works and major writers that teachers want to teach. Complete texts new to the Eighth Edition include the York Crucifixion play; More’s Utopia, Johnson’s Rasselas, Haywood’s Fantomina, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stoppard’s Arcadia, and Friel’s Translations. These important additions join Heaney’s award-winning translation of Beowulf, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Twelfth Night, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Behn’s Oroonoko, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, among others.

Color Plates

Forty-eight pages of beautiful color plates featuring more than seventy works of art provide students with visual counterpoints to the literary works and further expand students’ appreciation of the cultural milieu surrounding the literature. Captions draw attention to important details and cross-references related to literary works in the anthology. In addition to the color plates, black-and-white engravings and illustrations by Hogarth, Blake, and Rossetti provide examples of the hybrid art of the "visual narrative."

Lecture-Length Contextual Clusters

Each literary period includes two clusters of historically or culturally significant writings organized around a theme or topic that illuminates and expands on the literary selections. Eight clusters are entirely new, and all have been reconsidered to make them easier to teach in a lecture or two.

Global Literature in English

Building on the boundary-breaking Seventh Edition, the Eighth Edition reflects the editors’ continued commitment to give full voice to global literature in English. Joining such writers as Heaney, Achebe, Rhys, Gordimer, Naipaul, Coetzee, Munro, and Rushdie are seven new writers whose origins range from Bridgetown, Barbados, to Mygore, India, to Toronto, Canada, as a well as new contextual cluster, "Nation and Language," with Brian Friel’s powerful Translations as its centerpiece.