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 generalDCMPA30���ޱ�#�XB���Y3�:aP�"� �>q�D��%R�����%J�.�:%�E�J�D���"���haQ:���E�8t0/���L0�y �S��K � ��� !!Q�ҳ� � d�(��U(T� � 0�0�qB(b�DCMPA30���ޱ�#ЁB���Y3�:aP�"� �>q��JХO�X�E�'J�M��(F�(��"�>QzE��P��$�t|a�!�à��0xYu�e��c��Z ^��_ \}O �!�ʑ �: �"��b�����00f contact with reality and to bring related authors and works together in several ways:
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
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