The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

The Victorian Age. Among the major additions to this section, edited by Carol Christ and Catherine Bobson, are Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; two new long poems�Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Jenny; a new complete text of FitzGerald's The Rubaiydt of Omar Kayyam; and Rudyard Kipling's The White Man's Burden and If. Kipling's novella The Man Who Would Be King and Oscar Wilde's comedy The Importance of Being Earnest continue to be featured, as does the poetry of Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and others. Along with the widely assigned "Victorian Issues" clusters (Evolution, Industrialism, and the "Woman Question"), we present the topic "Empire and National Identity." This is an innovative and highly teachable sequence of paired texts, grappling with fiercely contentious issues that repeatedly arose across the empire's vast extent.

The Twentieth Century and After. A host of new writers and topics mark this major revision by the editors, Jon Stallworthy and Jahan Ramazani. The section now features two brilliant plays, Brian Friel's Translations and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, both of which have vital connections to literary and cultural issues that extend throughout these volumes. The many writers introduced to the anthology for the first time include the Indian poet A. K. Ramanujan, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, and the English poet Carol Ann Duffy. There are new stories by E. M. Forster and Jean Rhys, a new selection from J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and new poems by W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Derek Walcott, and Ted Hughes. There is, as before, a remarkable array of complete longer texts, including Hardy's "On the Western Circuit," Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Eliot's The Waste Land, Mansfield's "The Garden Party" and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," Beckett's Endgame, Lessing's "To Room Nineteen," Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Naipaul's One Out of Many. And two new, highly innovative topics will enable teachers to introduce students to major aspects of the period's cultural scene. The first, "Modernist Manifestos," brings together the radical experiments of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, H. D., Wyndham Lewis, and Mina Loy. The second, "Nation and Language," gets to the heart of the questions that face colonial and postcolonial writers who must grapple with the power, at once estranging and liberating, of the English language. The voices in this cluster, Claude McKay, Hugh MacDiarmid, Louise Bennett, Brian Friel, Kamau Brathwaite, Wole Soyinka, Tony Harrison, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Salman Rushdie, and John Agard, bear eloquent witness to the global diffusion of English, the urgency of unresolved issues of nation and identity, and the rich complexity of literary history. That history is not a straightforward sequence. Seamus Heaney's works, to which two new poems

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have been added, provide the occasion to look back again to Heaney's translation of Beowulf at the beginning of the anthology. This translation is a reminder that the most recent works can double back upon the distant past, and that words set down by men and women who have crumbled into dust can speak to us with astonishing directness.

Editorial Procedures

The Eighth Edition adheres to the core principles that have always characterized The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Period introductions, headnotes, and annotation are designed to enhance students' reading and, without imposing an interpretation, to give students the information they need to understand each text. The aim of these editorial materials is to make the anthology self-sufficient, so that it can be read anywhere�in a coffee bar, on a bus, or under a tree. Above all, we have tried always to keep in mind the actual classroom situation. Teachability is central to every aspect of these volumes.