The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century - Softcover

A best-seller for more than forty years, this is the survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. With 274 authors, the Eighth Edition deepens its representation of essential works in all genres, ranging from Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf" to global twentieth-century classics. Over 75 colour plates and thematic clusters of brief and historically significant texts bring to life the cultural concerns of each period. Concise glosses and annotations, period introductions, biographical headnotes, timelines and selected bibliographies help readers understand and enjoy the rich diversity of English literature.

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Tyrant, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Carol T. Christ (Ph.D. Yale) is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and President of Smith College. She is the author of The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity and Victorian Poetry and Victorian and Modern Poetics and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Mill on the Floss and, with John Jordan, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. She is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Deidre Shauna Lynch is Chancellor Jackman Professor and Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Economy of Character, which was awarded the MLA's Prize for a First Book, and editor of Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees and, with William B. Warner, Cultural Institutions of the Novel. She is also an editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, of the State University of New York Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and of the Northeast Association of Graduate Schools' Graduate Faculty Teaching Award. Jahan Ramazani (Ph.D. Yale and M.Phil. Oxford) is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, previously the Mayo NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor. He is the author of Transnational Poetics, which won the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and of Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime. He is coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ramazani is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the William Riley Parker Prize of the Modern Language Association. Catherine Robson (Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is Associate Professor of English at New York University and a faculty member of the Dickens Project. She is the author of Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman and Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (forthcoming), and has received fellowships from the NEH, the Guggenheim Foundation, the University of California, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Jon Stallworthy (M.A. and B.Litt. Oxford) is Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College of Oxford University, where he is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature. He is also former John Wendell Anderson Professor at Cornell, where he taught after a career at Oxford University Press. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His biography of Louis MacNeice won the Southern Arts Literary Prize. He is also the author of Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems and Singing School: The Making of a Poet, and editor of the definitive edition of Wilfred Owen's poetry, The Complete Poems and Fragments; The Penguin Book of Love Poetry; The Oxford Book of War Poetry; and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Stallworthy has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. Jack Stillinger (Ph.D. Harvard) is Center for Advanced Study Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats's Poems, The Texts of Keats's Poems, the standard edition of The Poems of John Keats; Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius; Coleridge and Textual Instability; and Reading "The Eve of St. Agnes." He is the recipient of Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellowships and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. M. H. Abrams (1912--2015) was Class of 1916 Professor of English, Emeritus at Cornell University. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for The Mirror and the Lamp and the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize for Natural Supernaturalism. He is also the author of The Milk of Paradise, A Glossary of Literary Terms, The Correspondent Breeze, and Doing Things with Texts. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Postwar fellowships, the Award in Humanistic Studies from the Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Keats-Shelley Society (1987), and the Award for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990). In 1999 The Mirror and the Lamp was ranked twenty-fifth among the Modern Library's "100 best nonfiction books written in English during the twentieth century."