The Norton Introduction to Literature

Citation

Mays, K. J. (Ed.). (2024). The Norton Introduction to Literature (15th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Chapter Summary

This is a very large book: Norton lists 2,224 pages. After a Preface for Instructors and an Introduction, it has four parts and 35 numbered chapters: Fiction (Chapters 1–10), Poetry (11–23), Drama (24–28) and Writing about Literature (29–35), followed by a section on critical approaches, indexes of authors and of titles and first lines, and a combined glossary and index of literary terms. The three genre parts share one design. Each opens with a "Reading, Responding, Writing" chapter, continues with "Understanding the Text" chapters on the elements of the genre, moves to "Exploring Contexts" chapters (an author's work, a cultural and historical moment, and a set of critical responses to one work), and ends with a further selection of works ("Reading More Fiction", "Reading More Poetry", "Reading More Drama"). Thematic "albums" of related works are scattered through the parts, many selections are followed by short "Authors on Their Work" statements, and sample student writing appears throughout. A separate "Contents by Topic" regroups the works under themes such as family, growing up, war, and gender and sexuality.

Introduction

Asks what literature is, what it does, what its genres are, and why read and study it, with poems by Keats and John Crowe Ransom and a poem by Hai-Dang Phan about his father's copy of the book's third edition (1981).

Chapters 1–10: Fiction

Chapter 1 introduces reading and responding to fiction, including graphic fiction, and follows a single story (Isabel Allende's "And of Clay Are We Created") from reading notes to a response paper and an essay. Chapters 2–7 take the elements in turn: plot (with the five parts of plot and common plot types), narration and point of view, character, setting, symbolism and figurative language, and theme. Each chapter defines its terms in short sections and then gives three to five stories, from Poe, Hawthorne and Joyce to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, George Saunders, Ted Chiang and Ling Ma. Chapters 8–10 shift to context: three stories by Flannery O'Connor with passages from her essays and letters and critical excerpts; women in turn-of-the-century America, pairing Chopin, Gilman, Glaspell and Yezierska with period documents; and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" with three critical essays.

Chapters 11–23: Poetry

Chapter 11 defines poetry, its subgenres and the prose poem, and models responding and writing. Chapters 12–20 cover speaker, situation and setting, theme and tone, word choice and order, visual imagery and figures of speech, symbol, the sounds of poetry (rhyme and meter), internal structure and external form, with albums on the sonnet, haiku and the golden shovel. Chapters 21–23 provide contexts: Adrienne Rich's poems and essays, with albums on Emily Dickinson, Pat Mora and Martín Espada; the Harlem Renaissance, with contextual excerpts and a #BlackLivesMatter album; and critical excerpts on Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" and Richard Blanco's inaugural poem "One Today".

Chapters 24–28: Drama

Chapter 24 uses Susan Glaspell's Trifles to show how to read drama and think theatrically, again moving from annotation to essay. Chapter 25 covers the elements of drama (character, plot and structure, stages and setting, tone, language and symbol, theme) through August Wilson's Fences and Quiara Alegría Hudes's Water by the Spoonful. Chapter 26 presents Shakespeare through A Midsummer Night's Dream and Othello. Chapter 27 places Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in its historical context (the Great Migration, housing segregation, the civil rights movement) with documents including Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Chapter 28 pairs a new translation of Sophocles's Antigone with critical excerpts from Jebb to Nussbaum. Further plays include Ibsen's A Doll House, Lynn Nottage's Sweat, Oedipus Tyrannos in a new translation and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

Chapters 29–35: Writing about Literature

A writing guide: basic moves (paraphrase, summary and description), the literature essay, the writing process, the research essay, quotation, citation and documentation, a new chapter on writing with generative AI, and a sample research essay. A closing section on critical approaches groups them by emphasis on the text, the source, the receiver, and historical and ideological criticism.

Key Concepts

Fiction (Chapters 1–10)

• Plot and its parts: action arranged into a sequence with conflict, pace and, in the book's terms, five parts.
• Narration and point of view: types of narrator, tense, and the distinction between narrator and implied author.
• Character types: protagonist and antagonist, flat and round, static and dynamic, stock characters and archetypes.
• Theme versus moral: theme as a general idea rather than a topic or a lesson.

Poetry (Chapters 11–23)

• Speaker: the voice of a poem, in narrative poems, dramatic monologues and lyrics.
• Figures of speech: simile, metaphor, personification, metonymy and synecdoche, allusion.
• Sound and meter: rhyme, other sound devices and poetic meter.
• Internal structure and external form: a poem's parts as an internal drama, and stanzas and fixed forms such as the sonnet and haiku.

Drama (Chapters 24–28)

• Thinking theatrically: reading a script with performance in mind.
• Elements of drama: character, plot and structure, stages and setting, tone, language and symbol, theme.

Contexts and Writing

• Three kinds of context: an author's body of work, a cultural and historical moment, and a work's critical reception.
• The literature essay: an argument about a text built through paraphrase, summary, description, quotation and citation.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Teaches reading and writing together. Each genre opens by taking one work from annotation and reading notes to a response paper and a finished essay, and Part Four adds a full writing guide, including the publisher's new advice on using generative AI tools responsibly.
• A clear, repeated structure. Elements, then contexts, then further reading in each genre lets students transfer skills from fiction to poetry to drama, and the three "Exploring Contexts" models (author, history, criticism) introduce research without a separate theory text.
• Range of selections. The book mixes long-anthologised works with many recent ones. The publisher names writers new to this edition, including Rebecca Makkai, Lauren Groff, Ted Chiang, Tommy Orange, Ling Ma and Amanda Gorman, and new translations of Antigone (Sheila Murnaghan) and Oedipus Tyrannos (Emily Wilson).
• Flexibility. The albums, the "Contents by Topic" and the Norton ebook let instructors build courses by theme rather than by element.

Limitations

• Size. At over 2,200 pages it holds far more than any single course can use; most students will read only a fraction of it, so the instructor's selection matters.
• Limited theory. Critical approaches receive one closing section rather than chapters, so courses that teach theory alongside reading will need a separate theory text.
• American emphasis in the contexts. The historical contexts chosen (turn-of-the-century American women, the Harlem Renaissance, A Raisin in the Sun) centre on the United States, and the poetry and drama of other traditions appear mainly as individual selections.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the fullest of the course's anthology-textbooks. Michael Meyer's The Bedford Introduction to Literature is a similar large anthology combining reading, analysis and writing; Gardner and colleagues' Literature: A Portable Anthology is a concise alternative when a smaller, cheaper collection of fiction, poetry and drama is enough. A course normally chooses one of these three.

The other books in the course build on what the Norton teaches. Bennett and Royle's An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory works through questions such as character, narrative and the author with theoretical depth, a natural companion once the Norton's elements chapters are familiar. Lentricchia and McLaughlin's Critical Terms for Literary Study and Rivkin and Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology are more advanced: the first offers essays on key terms, the second the theorists' own texts, extending the Norton's short section on critical approaches.

How to Use This Book

The book is designed for first-year introduction-to-literature courses; it assumes no previous literary study, only comfort with reading and writing extended English prose.

A practical approach:

• Begin with the Introduction and the "Reading, Responding, Writing" chapter of each genre. These set out the method the book follows, and the sample writing shows what is expected at each stage.
• Read one or two elements chapters a week, with two or three of their selections rather than all of them.
• Choose one "Exploring Contexts" chapter per genre as the basis for a short research assignment, using its critical or contextual excerpts as sources.
• Use Part Four throughout, not only at the end: the chapters on basic moves and the literature essay are useful from the first assignment, and the citation chapter whenever sources are used.
• Use the glossary/index of literary terms to review vocabulary before tests or essays.

The ebook and online tools (InQuizitive, close reading workshops, an MLA citation booklet) are bundled with the print book; check with the instructor which are part of the course.