Literature: A Portable Anthology

Citation

Gardner, J. E., Diaz, J., Lawn, B., Ridl, J., & Schakel, P. (2025). Literature: A Portable Anthology (6th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin's.

Chapter Summary

The sixth edition (©2025) has four parts. Part One is a nine-chapter guide to reading and writing about literature; Parts Two to Four hold the anthology itself: 40 stories, 200 poems and 9 plays, arranged by publication date within each genre. The book opens with a "Selections by Form and Theme" list for readers who want to read across the chronological order and closes with a glossary of critical and literary terms and an index of authors, titles and first lines. The publisher counts 12 new stories, 50 new poems and 5 new plays in this edition, and adds new guidance on reading difficult literature and on the role of artificial intelligence in writing.

Part One, Chapters 1–2: Introduction to Reading and Writing about Literature; The Role of Good Reading

Chapter 1 asks why one reads and writes about literature, what to expect in a literature class and how enjoyment fits in; a new section, "Literature and Difficulty," argues for the value of reading work that challenges the reader and encourages responsible, resilient responses to it. Chapter 2 covers rereading, close reading, "the myth of hidden meaning," annotating (with annotated examples of Yeats's "The Second Coming" and Jonson's "On My First Son"), note-taking, questions for close reading in each genre, and a checklist for good reading.

Part One, Chapters 3–4: The Writing Process; Common Writing Assignments

Chapter 3 moves from prewriting, thesis and argument through drafting, revising and editing (with global, local and final checklists) to peer workshops, quoting stories, poems and plays, and formatting. Chapter 4 walks through the summary response, explication, analysis, comparison and contrast, and the essay exam, each with student writing.

Part One, Chapters 5–7: Writing about Stories; Writing about Poems; Writing about Plays

One chapter per genre introduces its elements: for fiction, plot, character, point of view, setting, theme, symbolism and style; for poetry, the speaker, the listener, imagery, and sound and sense; for drama, plot, character and theme, diction, spectacle and setting, how to read a play, watching a play and the director's vision. Each includes annotated examples or a student essay, such as Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" for fiction and Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 for poetry.

Part One, Chapter 8: Writing a Literary Research Paper

Finding, evaluating and working with sources, the stages of writing the paper, understanding and avoiding plagiarism, MLA documentation and a sample research paper on Yeats's "The Second Coming." A new section, "Understanding Artificial Intelligence," discusses the implications of AI tools for student writing.

Part One, Chapter 9: Literary Criticism and Literary Theory

Brief accounts of twelve approaches, from formalism and New Criticism through feminist and gender criticism, queer theory, Marxist criticism, cultural studies, postcolonial criticism, historical criticism and New Historicism, psychological theories, reader-response theories and structuralism to poststructuralism and deconstruction and ecocriticism.

Part Two: Fiction

Forty stories from Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Poe and Chekhov through Joyce's "The Dead," Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Hurston, Hemingway, Faulkner, Jackson, Ellison and Baldwin to Carver, Erdrich, O'Brien, Atwood, Adichie and Ted Chiang. New to this edition are stories by Paule Marshall, Julio Cortázar, Ursula Le Guin, Leila Aboulela, Simon Rich, Carmen Maria Machado, Anthony Veasna So, Jonathan Escoffery, Etgar Keret, Jamil Jan Kochai, Morgan Talty and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu.

Part Three: Poetry

Two hundred poems, from the anonymous "The Wife's Lament" and Wyatt through Shakespeare, Donne, the Romantics, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Hughes, Bishop, Brooks and Heaney to poets such as Natasha Trethewey, Ada Limón, Ocean Vuong, Claudia Rankine, Natalie Diaz and Victoria Chang. The publisher highlights new poems in translation by Rumi, Hwang Jini and Fatma Krouma.

Part Four: Drama

Nine plays: Sophocles' Oedipus the King (in a new translation by David Kovacs), Shakespeare's As You Like It, Ibsen's A Doll House, Glaspell's Trifles, Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit, August Wilson's Fences, Lynn Nottage's Sweat and James Ijames's Fat Ham. All but A Doll House, Trifles, Fences and Sweat are marked as new in this edition.

Key Concepts

Part One: reading and writing

• Close reading and rereading: annotating a text and asking critical questions rather than looking for a hidden meaning.
• Thesis and argument: a paper makes a debatable claim and supports it with evidence from the text.
• Common assignments: summary response, explication, analysis, comparison and contrast, and the essay exam.
• Documentation and plagiarism: when and how to cite sources in MLA style.

Part One: elements and approaches

• Elements of fiction, poetry and drama: plot, character, point of view and the rest for stories; speaker, imagery and sound for poems; staging for plays.
• Critical approaches: the twelve schools surveyed in Chapter 9, now including ecocriticism.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A whole course in one volume. The publisher describes a well-balanced selection of classic and contemporary literature for introductory literature or literature-for-composition courses, with biographical headnotes, a complete guide to reading and writing, and a glossary.
• Writing instruction built on student models. Part One pairs its assignments with student essays and annotated texts.
• Range and recency. The table of contents marks the many works new to the edition, and the poems include translations and a large group of contemporary poets.
• Flexible ordering. The chronological arrangement within each genre is complemented by the "Selections by Form and Theme" list.

Limitations

• Elements compressed. Each genre's elements share one chapter, so there is less extended instruction on, say, figurative language or meter than in introductions that give each element its own chapter.
• A small drama section. Nine plays, one of them by Shakespeare, limit choice in a course that gives drama equal weight.
• Theory in brief. Chapter 9 surveys twelve approaches in a single chapter; students need a dedicated introduction to apply any of them in depth.
• Fifth-edition references do not carry over. Many selections were added or replaced, so syllabi and page references written for the fifth edition need checking.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the course books, this is the compact anthology for a first literature or literature-and-composition course. The Bedford Introduction to Literature and The Norton Introduction to Literature do the same job on a larger scale, with separate chapters on individual elements of fiction, poetry and drama; they suit courses that want more instruction per element, while the Portable Anthology suits courses that want the essential guidance and a broad reading list in a lighter book.

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle's An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is a natural companion for students who enjoy Chapter 9 and want to see theoretical questions arise from reading. Critical Terms for Literary Study and Rivkin and Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology belong later, once students can read critics and theorists in their own words.

How to Use This Book

The anthology is written for first- and second-year undergraduates; no previous study of literature is assumed. It suits a literature survey and a composition course that uses literature as its subject.

• Start with Chapters 1–3 before writing anything: they set out what a literature class expects and how a paper is built.
• Pair each genre unit with its chapter: Chapter 5 before the stories, Chapter 6 before the poems, Chapter 7 before the plays.
• Use Chapter 4 assignment by assignment, returning to the relevant section when that kind of paper is set.
• Read Chapter 8 before the research paper, and Chapter 9 when the course turns to criticism.
• Keep the glossary at hand and use the "Selections by Form and Theme" list to find companion texts for comparison essays.