The Norton Anthology of English Literature

The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by the W. W. Norton & Company. It has gone through eight editions since its inception in 1962; it is the publisher's best-selling anthology, with some eight million copies in print.Donadio, Rachel, The New York Times, January 8, 2006, The influential critic and scholar of Romanticism, M.H. Abrams, served as General Editor for the first seven editions of the anthology before handing the job to Stephen Greenblatt, a renowned Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor.

Spread across six volumes and divided into two sets, the anthology provides an overview of poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays, letters from Beowulf to the 21st century.

Format

The eighth 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...
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