Book Description
The Longman Anthology of British Literature is the first new anthology of British literature to appear in over 25 years. A major work of scholarship, it brings together an extraordinary collection of writings spanning some 1300 years of literary history from the Middle Ages to the present. Volume Two covers The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, The Victorian Age, and The Twentieth Century. The text aims to give a less monumental, more contextualized presentation of British literature. The traditional canonical writers are fully represented, with coverage of such central figures as Wordsworth, Conrad, and Joyce. But alongside these are numerous other literary voices, especially those of women. The most distinctive feature of the anthology are groupings of texts that allow contemporary social, political, and literary controversies to unfold in the voices of those who participated in them, thus enabling the great works of British literature to be taught in the context of their times.


From the Author
Too often, debate in the "culture wars" of recent years have assumed that there is an essential conflict between study of classics of earlier centuries and contemporary, multicultural writings. The Longman Anthology of British Literature shows that either/or choices do not need to be made: British literary culture has always been characterized by a dynamic mix of cultures -- English, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish. The great classics of British literature have come out of a rich cultural ferment that has always included popular as well as elite productions, women's writing as well as men's, secular as well as religious writing, regional as well as metropolitan perspectives, here seriously represented for the first time in a major anthology.


From the Back Cover
The first new anthology of British literature in 25 years, The Longman Anthology of British Literature presents the varieties of British literature within the dynamic cultural landscape of the British Isles.


About the Author
David Damrosch chairs the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of two books, The Narrative Covenant and We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University, together with articles on ancient, medieval, and modern literature and literary theory. He was a contributing editor to The HarperCollins World Reader, co-editing the sections on the ancient Mediterranean world and on postmodernism. Christopher Baswell is Professor and Chair of English at Barnard College. He recently received the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association for his book, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the "Aeneid" from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer. He is co-editor of The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition and his articles have appeared in Speculum, Tradition, and elsewhere. Clare Carroll is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Director of Irish Studies at Queens College. Co-editor of Richard Beacon's Solon His Follie and author of The Orlando Furioso, A Stoic Comedy, she is the recipient of a Queens College Presidential Research Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Institute. Kevin J. H. Dettmar is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain, editor of Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism, and co-editor of Marketing Modernisms: Canonization, Self-Promotion, Rereading and Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics. Heather Henderson is Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative as well as articles on Victorian autobiography and travel. Formerly the book review editor of The Dickens Quarterly, she is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the St. Andrews Society. Constance Jordan is Professor of English at Claremont Graduate University. Author of Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models and Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances, she is the recipient of American Council of Learned Societies, NEH Senior, and Folger Institute Fellowships. Peter J. Manning is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Byron and His Fictions, Reading Romantics, and numerous essays on aspects of British Romanticism. Co-editor with Susan Wolfson of editions of Byron, Scott, and of Praed, Hood, and Beddoes, he is the recipient of John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association. Anne Howland Schotter is Professor of English and Chair of Humanities at Wagner College. Co-editor of Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett and author of articles on the Pearl-poet and on medieval Latin poetry, she is the recipient of Woodrow Wilson and Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships. William Chapman Sharpe is Professor English at Barnard College. His is the author of Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams and co-editor of The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition and Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature. A former Fulbright Lecturer in France and Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, he is the recipient of fellowships from the John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Stuart Sherman is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. He was awarded the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for his book Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785. He is also the recipient of the Quantral Award for Undergraduate Teaching, as well as fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Chicago Humanities Institute. Jennifer Wicke is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Virginia. She is editor of Feminism and Postmodernism and of the forthcoming Born to Shop: Modernity and the Work of Consumption. Her book Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading was a finalist for the National Critics Book Circle Award in Criticism. Recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities, she has also written extensively on aspects of film, cultural criticism, and Anglo-American literature, especially on James Joyce. Susan J. Wolfson is Professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry; Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism; British Literature: Women in the Curriculum; and numerous essays on aspects of the British Romantic era. Co-editor with Peter J. Manning of editions of Byron, Scott, and of Praed, Hood, and Beddoes, she is the recipient of research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

FROM THE PUBLISHER