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The Norton Antology of American Literature #B
The Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature 1820-1865
The Norton Anthology of American Literature is the classic survey of American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to its flourishing present.
This volume, Volume B, covers American Literature from 1820 to
1865.
This volume, Volume B, covers American Literature from 1820 to
1865.
1666 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 1979
32 people are currently reading
553 people want to read
About the author
Nina Baym
39 books16 followersNina Baym (born 1936) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She is best known as the General Editor of the renowned The Norton Anthology of American Literature, from 1991 - 2018. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for over 40 years, from 1963 to 2004.
Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance.
While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated.
It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales.
“I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987.
She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity.
Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004).
Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text."
The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time.
Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She died in 1971.
Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance.
While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated.
It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales.
“I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987.
She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity.
Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004).
Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text."
The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time.
Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She died in 1971.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 29, 2016
I have a new found love for anthologies, and was glad I was assigned two of them for this semester. (This one & Volume C).
I'll probably read ahead and just flip through it.
For class "American Romanticism Through Realism"
Have Read
Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
Nature by Emerson
Self-Reliance by Emerson
Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (loved it!)
The Birth Mark by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
Narrative of Life by Frederick Douglass
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids by Herman Melville
We've finished with this anthology for the semester, I believe and are moving onto Volume C after we read Leaves of Grass.
I'll probably read ahead and just flip through it.
For class "American Romanticism Through Realism"
Have Read
Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
Nature by Emerson
Self-Reliance by Emerson
Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (loved it!)
The Birth Mark by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
Narrative of Life by Frederick Douglass
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids by Herman Melville
We've finished with this anthology for the semester, I believe and are moving onto Volume C after we read Leaves of Grass.
September 25, 2020
3/5 Stars (%61/100)
This continues from where volume A left off which is 1820. It covers 1820 to 1865. The Civil War literature is the main focus of this volume. A huge variety of African-American writers are included. I've said it before but I still use this book actively.
This continues from where volume A left off which is 1820. It covers 1820 to 1865. The Civil War literature is the main focus of this volume. A huge variety of African-American writers are included. I've said it before but I still use this book actively.
December 15, 2011
Excellent, beautiful, wonderful, I dropped a ginger teabag on it and its crinkly paper pages are forever marred but I love it still.
March 21, 2016
This book was primary course material in my freshman textual analysis and argumentation class. I've read a number of positive online raves about this volume prior to and during the extent of my course and I agree wholeheartedly with every single glowing review. This anthology is beautifully organized and the panoply of works is impressive, full-bodied, and intense.
From this collection, I absolutely loved (in no particular order):
1. Thoreau's Walden
2. Black Hawk
3. Petalesharo
4. Bryant's Thanatopsis
5. Whitman's Song of Myself
6. Melville's Benito Cereno
7. Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
8. All of Dickinson's poems (there are several featured in this volume, but I'm generally a sucker for Dickinson)
More than anything, I recommend this volume to American literature enthusiasts and avid readers who thoroughly enjoy perusing through such vivid pieces. The rich, varied works in this particular volume are a delicious snack for hungry readers. If you're interested in early American literature, poetry, or works with philosophical undertones, this is most certainly the volume for you.
From this collection, I absolutely loved (in no particular order):
1. Thoreau's Walden
2. Black Hawk
3. Petalesharo
4. Bryant's Thanatopsis
5. Whitman's Song of Myself
6. Melville's Benito Cereno
7. Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
8. All of Dickinson's poems (there are several featured in this volume, but I'm generally a sucker for Dickinson)
More than anything, I recommend this volume to American literature enthusiasts and avid readers who thoroughly enjoy perusing through such vivid pieces. The rich, varied works in this particular volume are a delicious snack for hungry readers. If you're interested in early American literature, poetry, or works with philosophical undertones, this is most certainly the volume for you.
June 5, 2009
I read and enjoyed: Irving ("Rip Van Winkle" & "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"), Emerson (Intro to "Nature", "Self-Reliance", "The American Scholar", & "The Poet"), Poe ("The Man of the Crowd", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Black Cat", & "The Purloined Letter"), Hawthorne ("My Kinsman, Major Molineux","The Minister's Black Veil", "The Birth-Mark", & "Rappaccini's Daughter"), Stowe (parts of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"), Thoreau ("Resistance to Civil Government", & Ch. 2 of "Walden"), Douglass ("Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself"), & Melville (Bartleby, The Scrivener").
October 12, 2021
This is a little bit like cheating to add to a reading challenge; only because I have been reading this Anthology, or re-reading some selections, for the last 5 years!
I love old literature! And I find these Norton Anthologies to be some of the most interesting collections of short stories, excerpts, history, and poetry available.
I finished volume 1 this morning by reading the short story Life in the Iron-Mills.
The literature that was written in America between the 1840s to 1860s is some of the most timeless, powerful writing in all of the world's literature.
I never get tired of it.
Never.
I love old literature! And I find these Norton Anthologies to be some of the most interesting collections of short stories, excerpts, history, and poetry available.
I finished volume 1 this morning by reading the short story Life in the Iron-Mills.
The literature that was written in America between the 1840s to 1860s is some of the most timeless, powerful writing in all of the world's literature.
I never get tired of it.
Never.
December 2, 2014
This is probably the best textbook I've ever had to read, but I think it may be because I'm very interested in a lot of the content in both Volumes A and B. I also really enjoyed the American Lit class I was taking. I don't think I ever really complained about my reading homework, I enjoyed all of the authors and poets.
January 9, 2014
Excellent book, has great authors and amazing stories. I would recommend this for anyone wanting to peruse some great literature from the United States of America. Whether you're a student or just looking for a good read, you'll find one here!
April 30, 2017
This book is packed with short stories, poetry, and excerpts from novels that were interesting and challenging. I enjoyed most all of them assigned in my American Literature course. There are some I read more than once and some I will go back and read again.
May 6, 2018
well. definitive, certainly. beautifully curated, powerfully edited, and wonderfully written. what a country we are, that can produce such wonders in so many ways, and not even stop to take stock of ourselves and what we have wrought.
December 21, 2010
Much better than Volume A, more readable and entertaining (while still being thought-provoking). More emphasis on creativity and thought (hello, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman).
Want to read
December 15, 2011Books read in this anthology for class:
The Scarlet letter (Hawthorne), The Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson, The Man of the Crowd, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Purloined Letter (Poe),
The Scarlet letter (Hawthorne), The Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson, The Man of the Crowd, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Purloined Letter (Poe),
December 3, 2012
read parts of this for uni.
May 29, 2014
Read it for school, was pretty good if you want to read about old works from the begining of the country up to after the civil war.
December 16, 2014
such great value for money
April 5, 2015
One of three books I had to read for my American literature class. Some of the stories were eh and other I enjoyed.
Read
October 21, 2016ghjkl;'
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 25, 2016
Read it for school and I'm glad to be done with it.
December 31, 2021
Got an A for American Literature, totally not biased with my review whatsoever.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews