The Longman Anthology of British Literature, 2nd Compact Edition: Volume A

by David Damrosch (Editor), Peter J. Manning (Editor), Constance Jordan

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 One covers The Middle Ages, The Early Modern Period, and The Restoration and the Eighteenth 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 Spencer, Milton, and Shakespeare. 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.

Genres: Anthologies, Reference

1488 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2003

About the author

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.