Volume 1 The Restoration and the 18th Century of The Longman Anthology of British Literature is a comprehensive and thoughtfully arranged anthology that offers a rich selection of major British authors throughout the Restoration and the 18th Century. The book includes Perspectives, Companion Readings, and "and Its Time" sections which show how major literary writings interrelate with and respond to various social, historical, and cultural events of Great Britain in the 18th Century. With a generous representation of fiction, drama, and poetry, the second edition includes major additions of important works and an expanded illustration program. Fresh and up-to-date introductions and notes are written by an editorial team whose members are all actively engaged in teaching and in current scholarship, and illustrations show both artistic and cultural developments of the period. For those interested in British Literature of the Restoration and 18th Century.
A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, David Damrosch has written widely on comparative and world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2008). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011), and Xin fangxiang: bijiao wenxue yu shijie wenxue duben [New Directions: A Reader of Comparative and World Literature], Peking U. P., 2010. He is presently completing a book entitled Comparing the Literatures: What Every Comparatist Needs to Know, and starting a book on the role of global scripts in the formation of national literatures.
logging this solely because I had to read poems from Aphra Behn and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester... these people were FREAKS... never imagined to be reading about sperm on a friday night. WOW
This was evidently written as a textbook, but don't let that discourage you. If you love the writing of British Restoration era and the Eighteenth Century, you'll want to read this book, which covers the periods of 1660 up to 1800. You will learn about styles of writing, about money, manners and monarchs, about life and politics as theater, about family relations including marriage and mistresses, about scandals and nervous disorders and dealing with death. You'll find excerpts from Alexander Pope, Mary Astrey's "Some Reflections upon Marriage," Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels, and Daniel Defoe's "The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." The book is a delight.
Not a bad anthology but I seem to prefer the Norton editions. I did like how they were much more friendly to the spine than the beastly Nortons though. I found that the endnotes weren't as good though and they didn't explain things as much as I would have liked them to.