The Norton Introduction to Literature

Exciting new contemporary selections

From graphic memoir (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis) to experimental drama (Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days / 365 Plays) to global fiction in English (Hanif Kureishi’s “Long Ago Yesterday”), the contemporary additions to the Tenth Edition are exciting and teachable.

Multiple selections by an author

More authors are represented by multiple selections in the Tenth Edition than ever before, including three “albums” devoted to Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Pat Mora. Two new “Author’s Work” chapters—one on James Joyce’s Dubliners and the other on William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience—focus not only on the authors but also on the material history of their respective books.

New longer works

Two chapters titled “The Longer Work” give teachers and students a chance to grapple with meaty, longer selections. Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” are included in the fiction chapter, and the poetry section contains a substantial excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf as well as T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

An unparalleled collection of “contextual” chapters

• A new chapter, “Cultural and Historical Contexts: Women in Turn-of-the-Century America,” features three of the most popular stories in the intro literature course—Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”—focus on women’s lives in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America.
• A new “Performance as Context” chapter in the Drama section focuses on the translation of plays “from page to stage.” The chapter features three plays—Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words II, selections from Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days / 365 Plays, and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (which is exclusive to Norton)—chosen to illustrate different aspects of this important topic in drama.
• Two new chapters on “The Author’s Work” (James Joyce’s Dubliners and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience) give students a sense of the author’s conception, the publication history, and the reception of two major works.

The most helpful, carefully edited apparatus

In the Tenth Edition, the “Reading, Responding, Writing” sections at the beginning of each genre have been extensively revised to show students how to turn close reading into exemplary writing, and more writing prompts and suggestions have been added throughout. Twelve new writing samples have been added, increasing the total writing samples to fifteen. Throughout the book, introductory matter has been revised to be more direct, clear, and helpful.

Innovative and extensive emedia ancillaries

The Norton Introduction to Literature instructor media package offers tools for writing, close reading, and analysis, as well as media that show students how literature connects with the world around them. The instructor media package includes an Instructor Resource Disc, with lecture PowerPoints and multimedia slideshows that complement the new thematic clusters and contextual chapters, and a two CD instructor audio companion. DVDs of many of the plays are available to qualified adopters on request.

New LITWEB workshops

Fifty new and improved LITWEB workshops hone student’s close reading skills and encourage them to read and write analytically, offering extensive, unmatched help for student writers. These resources complement the book's pedagogical elements and help instructors guide their students to read, think about, and write about literature as creatively and analytically as possible.