The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

The Early Seventeenth Century. At the heart of this section, edited by Barbara Lewalski and Katharine Eisaman Maus, is John Milton's Paradise Lost, presented in its entirety. Other complete longer works include John Donne's soul-searching Satire 3, Aemilia Lanyer's country-house poem "The Description of Cookham," three major works by Ben Jonson (The Masque of Blackness, Volpone [freshly edited by Katharine Eisaman Maus], and the Cary-Morison ode), John Webster's tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, and Milton's Lycidas. Significant additions have been made to the works of Donne, Jonson, Bacon, Carew, and Hobbes. Three newly conceived topical clusters will help teachers organize the rich profusion of seventeenth-century texts. "The Gender Wars" offers the stark contrast between Joseph Swetnam's misogynistic diatribe and Bachel Speght's vigorous response. "Forms of Inquiry" represents the vital intellectual currents of the period by bringing together reselected texts by Bacon, Burton, Browne, and Hobbes. And introducing riveting reports on the trial and execution of Charles I, political writings by the conservative Filmer and the revolutionaries Milton and Winstanley, and searching memoirs by Lucy Hutchinson, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Lady Anne Halkett, and Dorothy Waugh, "Crisis of Authority" shows how new literary forms arose out of the trauma of political conflict.

The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. In response to widespread demand and our own sense of its literary merit, the editors, Lawrence Lipking and James Noggle, include the complete text of Samuel Johnson's philosophical fable Rasselas. We introduce as well Fantomina, a novella of sexual role- playing by an author new to the anthology, Eliza Haywood. Other complete longer texts in this section include Dryden's satires Ahsolom and Achitophel and MacFlecknoe, Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko, Congreve's comedy The Way of the World, Pope's Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Epistle to Dr. Ahuthnot, Gay's Beggar's Opera, Hogarth's graphic satire "Marriage A-la- Mode," Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village." Additions have been made to the works of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Bochester, and Mary Leapor, and the selection from Joseph Addison and Sir Bichard Steele has been recast. "Liberty," a new thematic cluster on freedom and slavery, brings together texts by John Locke, Mary Astell, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and others.

The Romantic Period. The principal changes introduced by the editors, Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch, center on significantly increased attention to women writers of both poetry and prose. There are more poems by Anna Letitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith (including the great long work Beachy Head and a substantial selection from The Emigrants), Mary Bobinson, Joanna Baillie, and Felicia Hemans. Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth are now joined by two new woman authors, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. Mary Shelley is represented by two works, her introduction to The Last Man

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and her story "The Mortal Immortal" (Frankenstein, formerly in the anthology, is now available in a Norton Critical Edition). There are additional poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats and new prose pieces by Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, and John Clare. A new topic, "The Gothic and the Development of a Mass Readership," focuses on the controversial history of a genre that continues to shape popular fiction and films. Writings by Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Ann Radcliff, and "Monk" Lewis, together with commentaries and reviews by contemporaries such as Anna Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, illuminate the promise and menace that this period saw in a mode of writing that opened up a realm of nightmarish terror to literary exploration.