The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Citation

Greenblatt, S. (General Ed.). (2024). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (11th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Chapter Summary

Format of the Eleventh Edition

The first edition of this anthology appeared in 1962. The eleventh edition, published in 2024 under the general editorship of Stephen Greenblatt, is published in two forms. The full anthology has six volumes, A to F, sold as two packages (A, B and C; D, E and F). The Shorter Eleventh Edition has two volumes, with Volume 1 starting with the Middle Ages and Volume 2 beginning with the Romantic period. Norton credits a different group of period editors to each volume, with Greenblatt as general editor. An ebook is available on the Norton Ebook Reader. Each volume opens with a preface to the eleventh edition, then a period introduction and timeline, followed by authors and thematic clusters. Volume B's contents list shows appendices on literary terminology, British money, the royal lines of England and religions in Great Britain, as well as a general bibliography.

Volume A: The Middle Ages (to ca. 1485)

The volume has three groups of writing. The early Middle Ages (eighth to eleventh centuries) includes Bede and Cædmon's Hymn, The Dream of the Rood, Beowulf, Judith, Alfred, The Wanderer, The Wife's Lament, The Ruin, the riddles and early Irish lyrics. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries have clusters on the myth of Arthur's return, romance (The Lady of the Fountain), Marie de France, Tristan and Ysolt, "God's Body", Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, mystery plays and "Religious Exclusions and Identities". The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries bring Sir Orfeo, Langland's Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (the General Prologue, the Miller's, Wife of Bath's, Pardoner's and Nun's Priest's tales and others), Gower, Hoccleve, Malory and Everyman.

Volume B: The Sixteenth Century (1485–1603) and the Early Seventeenth Century (1603–1660)

The first half covers Skelton, More, Wyatt, Surrey, a cluster on "Faith in Conflict", writing by Tudor women, Spenser (including Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, the Mutabilitie Cantos and the Amoretti), a commonplace book, Sidney, Marlowe and Shakespeare (the sonnets, Othello and The Tempest), followed by "England and the World". The seventeenth-century half has Donne, Lanyer, Jonson, Wroth, Webster, Bacon, Herbert, Marvell and Cavendish, and ends with Milton's shorter poems, extracts from his prose, his sonnets and Paradise Lost.

Volume C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1660–1785)

The volume spans Dryden, Pepys, Bunyan, Rochester, Behn, Finch, Astell, Congreve, Addison and Steele's Spectator essays, The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Pope (The Rape of the Lock), Gay, Montagu, Haywood, Johnson, Boswell, Gray, Goldsmith and Burney. Clusters on "Confronting the Law" and "Slavery in Poetry" sit alongside Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano.

Volume D: The Romantic Period (1785–1832)

The volume gathers Barbauld, Smith, Blake, Burns, Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, Wordsworth (including Lyrical Ballads and the 1805 Prelude), Dorothy Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), Lamb, Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, Clare, Hemans and Keats. Mary Shelley appears with The Last Man and "The Mortal Immortal". Clusters include "Science, Speculation, and Experiment", "The French Revolution Controversy" and "The Haitian Revolution".

Volume E: The Victorian Age (1830–1901)

Volume E opens with a group of clusters on empire (Great Britain's imperial mission, slavery and the plantation system, India, New Zealand and South Africa, the British Isles) and continues with Carlyle, Seacole, Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Darwin, Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Ruskin, George Eliot (The Lifted Veil), a cluster on Victorian debates about women, gender and sexuality, Arnold, the Rossettis, Morris, Swinburne, Pater, Hopkins, Stevenson, Wilde, Conan Doyle, Tagore, Kipling and Gandhi.

Volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Volume F runs from Hardy, Conrad (Heart of Darkness) and the First World War poets through Imagism and Yeats, Forster, Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own), Joyce (The Dead and an extract from Ulysses), Lawrence and T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land). It continues with Mansfield, Rhys, Orwell, Beckett and Auden, a run of writers from the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia and elsewhere (among them Marson, Bennett, Brathwaite, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Selvon and NourbeSe Philip), and contemporary authors including Heaney, Atwood, Coetzee, Rushdie, Mantel, Ishiguro, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Key Concepts

Volumes A–C

• Period introduction and timeline: each period opens with an essay and a timeline that place the authors in historical order.
• Thematic clusters: groups of shorter texts, such as "The Myth of Arthur's Return", "Faith in Conflict" or "Confronting the Law", set several writers beside one issue.
• Women's writing and religious difference: the volumes include Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Lanyer, Behn, Astell and clusters on religious exclusion.

Volumes D–F

• Empire and abolition: Volumes D and E bring in the Haitian Revolution, slavery, India and the British Empire as contexts for canonical writers.
• Gender and sexuality: Volume E has a cluster of Victorian debates about women, gender and sexuality.
• World English: Volume F adds writers from the Caribbean, Africa, India and elsewhere.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A full historical sequence in one set. Volumes A to F run from Old English poetry to twenty-first-century fiction, with introductions and timelines at the start of each period.
• Some complete long works. The contents show Beowulf, Gulliver's Travels, Othello, The Tempest, Heart of Darkness, Mrs. Dalloway and The Waste Land as entries, so a survey can use them without extra books.
• Contexts built into the selection. Clusters on empire, slavery, women's work and science place canonical texts beside other voices.
• A shorter version. The two-volume Shorter Eleventh Edition lets a single-year survey keep to one set.

Limitations

• Excerpts and omissions. The long Romantic and Victorian novels are mostly absent. George Eliot is represented in Volume E by The Lifted Veil rather than Middlemarch, and Dickens by A Christmas Carol; in Volume D Mary Shelley appears with The Last Man and a story, not Frankenstein. A course on the novel needs separate editions.
• Weight. Norton's listings give the volumes between roughly 770 and 1,770 pages each, and the full set is six large books.
• A British frame. Despite the wider contexts, the anthology is organised around British and Irish literary history, with writers from elsewhere added to it, so it does not replace an anthology of world literature.
• Edition changes. The anthology has appeared in eleven editions since 1962, so a syllabus may cite page numbers or selections from an earlier one, and students should check which edition is assigned.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the British literature course this is the survey anthology: it gives the primary texts and the period introductions, while the other books do different jobs. Bate's English Literature: A Very Short Introduction and Carter and McRae's Routledge History of Literature in English are short overviews, Sanders's Short Oxford History of English Literature gives a continuous narrative, and Raymond Williams's The Country and the City is a critical study of one theme. The Norton Critical Editions of Middlemarch and Paradise Lost supply what the anthology cannot: Chatterjee's edition gives the whole Victorian novel, and Teskey's gives the full poem with annotation and criticism.

How to Use This Book

This is a reference set rather than a book to read straight through. Choose the volumes your course covers, or the Shorter Eleventh Edition if one year must cover everything. For each period, read the introduction and timeline first, then the headnote to each author, then the texts, and use the footnotes for unfamiliar words. Two packages divide the set naturally: Volumes A to C for the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, and D to F for the Romantic period onwards.

For self-study, pick two or three authors or clusters per period rather than trying to cover everything, and read the clusters to see a text in conversation with others. Use the appendices (literary terminology, the general bibliography) when an essay needs a term or further reading, and use the ebook if you want to search across the set.