The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume I: The Middle Ages through The Eighteenth Century Fourth Edition, edited by David Damrosch and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Pearson Education)
Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume II, The Romantics to the 20th Century and Beyond Fourth Edition, edited by David Damrosch, Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Christopher Baswell, and Clare Carroll (Pearson Education) With its first edition, The Longman Anthology of British Literature created a new paradigm for anthologies. Responding to major shifts in literary studies over the past thirty years, it became the first collection to pay detailed attention to the contexts within which these classic works of British literature were created and to highlight the full cultural diversity of the British isles. For the first time, canonical authors mingled with newly visible writers; English accents were heard next to Anglo-Norman, Welsh, and Scottish ones; female and male voices were set in dialogue; literature from the British Isles was integrated with post-colonial writing; and major works were complemented with shorter pieces and "perspectives" groupings that brought literary, social, cultural, and historical issues vividly to life.

Responding to the shifting interests in the discipline, the heavily updated fourth edition builds on these pioneering features. This new edition will be welcomed not only by students and academics hungry for an anthology that reflects the current state of academia, but also by general readers who want to expand their literary horizons by developing a nuanced understanding of the classic works that shape literary production to this day. The addition of Penguin Classics editions of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will help readers tackle these foundational texts with translations that are as riveting as they are authoritative and scholarly. Informative, illustrated "Britain at a Glance" features now open each volume to help readers connect with the worlds that are illuminated in this anthology. Important new texts have been added, such as William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, which has been hailed as the first English novel, books six and seven of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Othello and King Lear, the poetry of Emily Brontë, the works of Carol Ann Duffy, a new section on contemporary British fiction, and many more. The Longman Anthology of British Literature contains all of the complete works that readers are looking for in a handsome two-volume set and will provide many hours of reading enjoyment.

Volume One covers literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. Chaucer, Elizabeth I, Jonson, Milton, Defoe, and Hogarth are just a few of the literary treasures in the first book.

Volume Two takes readers from the Romantics to the Twenty-First Century. Romantic luminaries such as Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Blake; the timeless texts written during the Victorian Era by Tennyson, Dickens, the Brownings, the Brontës, Kipling, and Wilde; and modern masterpieces by Shaw, Hardy, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Gordimer, and Rushdie are just a few of the highlighted works.

The anthology is also available as six separate volumes divided into the major periods of British literary history.

As with the previous three incarnations, The Longman Anthology of British Literature continues to offer extended selections from a wide range of women writers, including Margery Kempe, Lady Mary Wroth, Joanne Baillie, Anne and Charlotte Brontë, and Carol Anne Duffy. The anthology is also lavishly illustrated with photos, plates, and drawings — both in color and black and white — that illuminate and contextualize individual works which sets it apart from any other collection of its kind.

"We keep hearing from students who are genuinely surprised that a course in British Literature could be so engaging. This anthology is the kind of revolutionary-book( that only comes along once in a lifetime. It brings new energy to students' study and appreciation of the great figures in British Literature. The Longman Anthology of British Literature is precedent-setting in its diversity and in the way it enriches reading by presenting works in context," says Joseph Terry, Vice President, Editor in Chief of Literature at Pearson Higher Education.

The Longman Anthology of British Literature is essential reading for anyone with an interest in British literature, politics, history, and culture.

About the Editors:

David Damrosch is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, and has written widely on world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include What Is World Literature?, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, and How to Read World Literature. He is the founding general editor of the six-volume The Longman Anthology of World Literature, Second Edition and the editor of Teaching World Literature.

Kevin J. H. Dettmar is W. M. Keck Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Pomona College and Past President of the Modernist Studies Association. He is the author of The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism and Is Rock Dead?, and the editor of Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism, Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, the Barnes & Noble Classics editions of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners; The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture; and The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan.

With the success of the first three editions of The Longman Anthology of British Literature and its growing popularity in the world of academia, there is much to celebrate with the 4th edition of this critically-acclaimed, 2-volume anthology which will be unveiled in two stages — volume one in August and volume two in November. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, edited by David Damrosch, Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Chair of the Department of English at Pomona College is a must-have for all fans of classic and contemporary British literature.

You may be thinking that this is simply a new edition of a major textbook, so what's the news angle. Here are just a few of the different topics that could be covered in an interview or feature:

The behind-the-scenes look at making of a seminal anthology: To create such an instant classic, it took more than 15 years, 5,800 pages, and over 1,200 selections from over 250 literary luminaries. The Longman Anthology of British Literature brings together nearly everything any bibliophile could ask for in one collection. Penguin Classic's authoritative translation of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, extensive coverage of Shakespeare and Milton, full-length Victorian novels, and some of the best fiction by Britain's popular authors of today skillfully weave British history, culture, politics, and social issues together from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. The anthology editors and Pearson editors and publishers are available to talk about the merits of this work and its place in literary landscape.

The Battle of the Anthologies: There is a fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of two companies dueling over domination of the academic marketplace, one resorting to desperate measures while the other listens carefully to what professors and students need in a literary text. The competition's desire to remain the only player in the field clearly shows the dog-eat-dog world of publishing that the general public never sees — a battle to the death over the 80,000 to 90,000 copies sold to English majors each year. This could be a fascinating think piece between David Damrosch and fellow Harvard colleague Stephen Greenblatt, who now serves as the general editor to the Norton Anthology. Included in this press packet is Sean Shesgreen's 2009 piece, which brings to the forefront the high-stakes, cut-throat world of academic publishing. From Norton's less-than-savory dealings to obtain contents for The Longman Anthology of British Literature to Norton's open dismissal of including more women's voices, this article examines ground-breaking evidence of the lengths that a publisher will go to maintain its stranglehold on the marketplace.

• The New Keeper of the Canon: David Damrosch brings a fresh, younger perspective to study of British literature with his finger on the pulse of how the field of literary studies has changed in the past half a century. The Longman Anthology has steadily gained its foothold in the college market through innovation and careful attention to the transformation that has been taking place over the past couple of decades. A profile on David Damrosch could illustrate why he is now the heir apparent on the subject.
• The Changing of the Canon: The Norton Anthology of English Literature was first published in 1963, yet by the time its sixth edition published in 1993, only minor updates had been made. The Longman Anthology reflected, retooled, and rethought the very core of the field under David Damrosch's and his team of contributors' watchful eyes. Damrosch will shed light on what makes the Longman Anthology unique and how British literature has evolved from the Middle Ages to today. Damrosch even contends that Norton's take on the coverage of 20th century literature simply follows the Longman model that he set forth.
• The Voices of Women: For centuries the great works of women writers remained undervalued and largely unnoticed. These voices were finally heard when Longman published the first edition of its collection. Norton still lags behind in their coverage of women writers.
• The Longman Anthology of British Literature is so much more than a comprehensive textbook. It is an amazing collection of the great masterpieces of English literature that will be a welcome addition to any booklover's home library. What other tome houses the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Hardy, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Wolfe, T. S. Eliot, and V. S. Naipaul.

Literature has a double life. Born in one time and place and read in another, literary works are at once products of their age and independent creations, able to live on long after their original world has disappeared. The goal The Longman Anthology of British Literature is to present a wealth of poetry, prose, and drama from the full sweep of the literary history of Great Britain and its empire, and to do so in ways that will bring out both the works' original cultural contexts and their lasting aesthetic power. These aspects are in fact closely related: form and content, verbal music and social meanings, go hand in hand. This double life makes literature, as Aristotle said, "the most philosophical" of all the arts, intimately connected to ideas and to realities that the writer transforms into moving patterns of words. The challenge is to show these works in the contexts in which, and for which, they were written, while at the same time not trapping them within those contexts. The warm response this anthology has received from the hundreds of teachers who have adopted it in its first three editions reflects the growing consensus that we are not forced to choose between the literature's aesthetic and cultural dimensions. Our users' responses have now guided us in seeing how we can improve our anthology further, so as to be most pleasurable and stimulating to students, most useful to teachers, and most responsive to ongoing developments in literary studies. This preface can serve as a road map to this book's goals and structure.

NEW TO THIS EDITION

Period at a Glance features. These informative illustrated features open each volume, providing thumbnail sketches of daily life during each period.

Enhanced Web site. A new fourth edition site includes an archive of valuable texts from previous editions, detailed bibliographies, an interactive timeline, discussion questions, and Web resources for major selections and authors.

New major, classic texts. In response to instructors' requests, major additions of important works frequently taught in the British Literature course have been added, including the following selections:

• A selection from the Irish epic The Táin Bó Cuailnge
• William Baldwin's Beware the Cat (sometimes called the first English novel)
• Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book 6 and the Cantos of Mutabilitie William Shakespeare's Othello and King Lear
• New selections across the anthology. We have continued to refine our contents, adding new selections to established units across the anthology, including authors such as John Skelton, Fynes Moryson, Edmund Spenser, and John Donne.
• Penguin Classics editions of Beowulf translated by Michael Alexander and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translated by Brian Stone. The Longman Anthology of British Literature now includes authoritative Penguin Classic translations, trusted throughout the world as editions of classics texts that are both riveting and scholarly.
• New Perspectives groupings of works in cultural context. "Perspectives" groupings new to this edition include The English Sonnet and Sonnet Sequences in the Sixteenth Century, Early Modern Books, and England, Britain, and the World.
• New Response pairings. A selection from Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis is paired with Sir Thomas More's Utopia.

LITERATURE IN ITS TIME—AND IN OURS

When we engage with a rich literary history that extends back over a thousand years, we often encounter writers who assume their readers know all sorts of things that are little known today: historical facts, social issues, literary and cultural references. Beyond specific information, these works will have come out of a very different literary culture than our own. Even the contemporary British Isles present a cultural situation—or a mix of cultures—very different from what North American readers encounter at home, and these differences only increase as we go farther back in time. A major emphasis of this anthology is to bring the works' original cultural moment to life: not because the works simply or naively reflect that moment of origin, but because they do refract it in fascinating ways. British literature is both a major heritage for modern North America and, in many ways, a very distinct culture; reading British literature will regularly give an experience both of connection and of difference. Great writers create imaginative worlds that have their own compelling internal logic, and a prime purpose of this anthology is to help readers to understand the formal means—whether of genre, rhetoric, or style—with which these writers have created works of haunting beauty. At the same time, as Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own, the gossamer threads of the artist's web are joined to reality "with bands of steel."

The Longman Anthology pursues a range of strategies to bring out both the beauty of these webs of words and their points of contact with reality and to bring related authors and works together in several ways:

• PERSPECTIVES: Broad groupings that illuminate underlying issues in a variety of the major works of a period.
• AND ITS TIME: A focused cluster that illuminates a specific cultural moment or a debate to which an author is responding.
• RESPONSES: One or more texts in which later authors in the tradition respond creatively to the challenging texts of their forebears.

These groupings provide a range of means of access to the literary culture of each period. The Perspectives sections do much more than record what major writers thought about an issue: they give a variety of views in a range of voices, to illustrate the wider culture within which the literature was being written. Theological reflections by the pioneering scientist Isaac Newton; these and many other vivid readings featured in Volume One give rhetorical as well as social contexts for the poems, plays, and stories around them. Perspectives sections typically relate to several major authors of the period, as with a section on the sixteenth-century sonnet that brings the poetry of Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney into conversation with less widely read figures like Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Most of the writers included in Perspectives sections are important figures of the period who might be neglected if they were listed on their own with just a few pages each; grouping them together has proved to be useful pedagogically as well as intellectually. Perspectives sections may also include work by a major author whose primary listing appears elsewhere in the period; thus, a Perspective section on the Civil War features a selection from Milton's Eikonoklastes, and a section on British perceptions of other lands includes a selection from Spenser's View of the State of Ireland, so as to give a rounded presentation of the issue in ways that can inform the reading of those authors in their individual sections.

When we present a major work "And Its Time," we give a cluster of related materials to suggest the context within which the work was written. Thus Sir Philip Sidney's great Apology for Poetry is accompanied by readings showing the controversy that was raging at the time concerning the nature and value of poetry. Some of the writers in these groupings and in our Perspectives sections have not traditionally been seen as literary figures, but all have produced lively and intriguing works, from medieval clerics writing about saints and sea monsters, to a polemical seventeenth-century tract giving The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, to economic writings by William Petty—of the type parodied by Swift in his "Modest Proposal."

We also include "Responses" to significant texts in the British literary tradition, demonstrating the sometimes far-reaching influence these works have had over the decades and centuries, and sometimes across oceans and continents. Beowulf and John Gardner's Grendel are separated by the Atlantic ocean, perhaps eleven hundred or twelve hundred years—and, most notably, by their attitude toward the poem's monster. The Morte D'arthur is reinterpreted comically by the 1970s British comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus.

WHAT IS BRITISH LITERATURE?

Stepping back from the structure of the book, let us define our basic terms: What is "British" literature? What is literature itself? And just what should an anthology of this material look like at the present time? The term "British" can mean many things, some of them contradictory, some of them even offensive to people on whom the name has been imposed. If the term "British" has no ultimate essence, it does have a history. The first British were Celtic people who inhabited the British Isles and the northern coast of France (still called Brittany) before various Germanic tribes of Angles and Saxons moved onto the islands in the fifth and sixth centuries. Gradually the Angles and Saxons amalgamated into the Anglo-Saxon culture that became dominant in the southern and eastern regions of Britain and then spread outward; the old British people were pushed west, toward what became known as Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland, which remained independent kingdoms for centuries, as did Celtic Scotland to the north. By an ironic twist of linguistic fate, the Anglo-Saxons began to appropriate the term "British" from the Britons they had displaced, and they took as a national hero the early, semimythic Welsh King Arthur. By the seventeenth century, English monarchs had extended their sway over Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, and they began to refer to their holdings as "Great Britain." Today, Great Britain includes England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, but does not include the Republic of Ireland, which has been independent since 1922.

This anthology uses "British" in a broad sense, as a geographical term encompassing the whole of the British Isles. For all its fraught history, it seems a more satisfactory term than to speak simply of "English" literature, for two reasons. First, most speakers of English live in countries that are not the focus of this anthology (for instance, the United States and Canada); second, while the English language and its literature have long been dominant in the British Isles, other cultures in the region have always used other languages and have produced great literature in these languages. Important works by Irish, Welsh, and Scots writers appear regularly in the body of this anthology, some of them written directly in their languages and presented here in translation, and others written in an English inflected by the rhythms, habits of thought, and modes of expression characteristic of these other languages and the people who use them.

We use the term "literature" in a similarly capacious sense, to refer to a range of artistically shaped works written in a charged language, appealing to the imagination at least as much as to discursive reasoning. It is only relatively recently that creative writers have been able to make a living composing poems, plays, and novels, and only in the past hundred years or so has creating "belles lettres" or high literary art been thought of as a sharply separate sphere of activity from other sorts of writing that the same authors would regularly produce. Sometimes, early modem poets wrote sonnets to reflect and honor loves won and lost; at other times, they wrote sonnets to realize courtly ambition and material gain; and always, they wrote their sonnets with an eye to posterity, and with the goal of a poetic form of immortality ("Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme"—Shakespeare, Sonnet 55).

VARIETIES OF LITERARY EXPERIENCE

Above all, we have strived to give as full a presentation as possible to the varieties of great literature produced from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries in the British Isles, by women as well as by men, in outlying regions as well as in the metropolitan center of London, and in prose, drama, and verse alike. For these earlier periods, we include More's entire Utopia, Baldwin's Beware the Cat, and Milton's Paradise Lost, and we give major space to narrative poetry by Chaucer and Spenser, and to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, among others. Drama appears throughout the anthology, from the medieval Second Play of the Shepherds and Mankind to a range of early modern and restoration plays: Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Othello, and King Lear, Jonson's The Alchemist, William Wyncherly's The Country Wife, and John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Finally, lyric poetry appears in profusion

throughout the anthology, from early lyrics by anonymous Middle English poets and the trenchantly witty Dafydd ap Gwilym to the great flowering of lyric poetry in the early modern period in the writings of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser—to name just the "S's"—to the formal perfection and august rhetoric of Restoration and eighteenth-century poets like Swift, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson. Prose fiction always struggles for space in a literary anthology, but we close this volume with a selection from some of the most vital novelistic writing of the eighteenth century. We hop( that this anthology will show that the great works of earlier centuries can speak to us compellingly today, their value only increased by the resistance they offer to our views of ourselves and our world. To read and reread the full sweep of this literature is to be struck anew by the degree to which the most radically new works are rooter in centuries of prior innovation.

ILLUSTRATING VISUAL CULTURE

Another important context for literary production has been a different kind of culture: the visual. This edition includes a suite of color plates in each volume, along with hundreds of black-and-white illustrations throughout the anthology, chosen to show artistic and cultural images that figured importantly for literary creation. Sometimes, a poem refers to a specific painting, or more generally emulates qualities of a school of visual art. At other times, more popular materials like frontispieces may illuminate scenes in early modern writing. In some cases, visual and literary creation have merged, as in William Hogarth's series A Rake's Progress, included in Volume One. Thumbnail portraits of many major authors mark the beginning of author introductions.

AIDS TO UNDERSTANDING

We have attempted to contextualize our selections in suggestive rather than exhaustive ways, trying to enhance rather than overwhelm the experience of reading the texts themselves. Thus, when difficult or archaic words need defining in poems, we use glosses in the margins, so as to disrupt the reader's eye as little as possible; footnotes are intended to be concise and informative, rather than massive or interpretive. Important literary and social terms are defined when they are used. For convenience of reference, new Period at a Glance features appear at the beginning of each period, providing a thumbnail sketch of daily life during the period. With these informative, illustrated features readers can begin to connect with the world that the anthology is illuminating. Sums of money, for instance, can be understood better when one knows what a loaf of bread cost at the time; the symbolic values attached to various articles of clothing are sometimes difficult for today's readers to decipher, without some information about contemporary apparel and its class 'associations. And the gradual shift of the Empire's population from rural regions to urban centers is graphically presented in charts for each period.

LOOKING—AND LISTENING—FURTHER
Beyond the boundaries of the anthology itself, we have expanded our Web site,
available to all readers at www.myliteraturekit.com; this site gives a wealth of
information, annotated links to related sites, and an archive of texts for further
reading. For reference, there is also an extensive glossary of literary and cultural
terms available there, together with useful summaries of British political and religious organization, and of money, weights, and measures. For further reading, carefully selected, up-to-date bibliographies for each period and for each author can be found in on the Web site. A guide to our media resources can be found at the end of the table of contents.

For instructors, we have revised and expanded our popular companion volume, Teaching British Literature, written directly by the anthology editors, 600 pages in length, available free to everyone who adopts the anthology.