The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by W. W. Norton & Company, one of several such compendiums. First published in 1962, it has gone through ten editions; as of 2006 there are over eight million copies in print, making it the publisher's best-selling anthology. M. H. Abrams, a critic and scholar of Romanticism, served as General Editor for its first seven editions, before handing the job to Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor. The anthology provides an overview of poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays, and letters from Beowulf to the beginning of the 21st century.
Format
1st edition
The first edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, printed in 1962, comprised two volumes. Also printed in 1962 was a single-volume derivative edition, called The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major Authors Edition, which contained reprintings with some additions and changes including 28 of the major authors appearing in the original edition.
7th edition
The seventh edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature comprises six volumes, sold in two sets of three. 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. Historical and biographical information is provided in a series of headnotes for each author and in introductions for each of the time periods.
Within this structure, the anthology incorporates a number of thematically linked "clusters" of texts pertaining to significant contemporary concerns. 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.
The seventh edition was also sold in two volumes, which simply compressed six eras into two larger volumes, each volume comprising three eras. Volume 1 comprised the selection of literature from "'The Middle Ages" to the "English Restoration and the Eighteenth Century", while Volume 2 included the selection of literature from "The Romantic Period" to "The Twentieth Century and After".
Another option was the "Major Authors" edition. Compressed into the single volume was a selection of major authors of each period, from the anonymous author of Beowulf to J. M. Coetzee.
9th edition
The ninth edition continues to be sold in the same format as the eighth edition.
10th edition
The tenth edition of the anthology went on sale in June 2018 and has continued to be sold in the same format as its two prior editions, while adding a host of new writers to its already substantially eclectic range.
History
Published in 1962, the first edition of Norton Anthology was based on an English literature survey course Abrams and fellow editor David Daiches taught at Cornell University. The anthology underwent periodic revisions every few years. The fifth edition in 1986 included the addition of the full texts of James Joyce's "The Dead" and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The sixth edition, published in 1993, included Nadine Gordimer and Fleur Adcock. The seventh edition added Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart.