Buying Books for this Section of 211

Buying the Textbook Takes Thought:

        If you are buying the Norton Anthology for this course, please keep in mind that I am using the 7th edition (2000).  Click here for advice about buying the Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 1 (ISBN: 039310544X) in used condition from online or local bookstores.  The 8th edition is almost identical in its contents, but its pagination will differ.  If you elect to buy a new 8th instead of shopping for the plentiful used copies of the 7th, you will have to correct the page numbers.  If you just work from the syllabus titles and the table of contents you should be able to adjust all references fairly quickly.  I am using the older edition for at least one more year in order to save students some money (you can't easily buy used copies of the 8th), and to avoid the massive task of renumbering all the page references on this entire web site, and transferring the notes from my printed edition of the 7th. 

What is an "Edition" of a Work of Literature?:

        Deciding which "Norton Anthology" to buy raises the interesting notion of what an "edition" is, as opposed to a "work of literature," and what the editors do to a work of literature that makes their "edition" worth paying good money for.  For one example of something editors and printers do to make their editions seem attractive, take a look at this title page from a multi-volume set of the "collected works" of Martin Luther: Martin Luther (Wittenburg: Peter Seitz, 1566).  The woodcut image depicts Luther, the great Protestant Reformer (not the excommunicated schismatic heretic!) praying at the foot of the cross with Phillip Melanchthon, another famous German Humanist scholar.  What are readers supposed to learn from this huge (40+ cm. high) folio edition, bound in real wooden boards with forged iron clasps on its fore-edge?  How does that relate to what the Norton editors are attempting to communicate with the Anthology's cover and title page layout, format, apparatus (notes and forwards, etc.), and presentation of its contents.  Remember, you are a researcher, not a passive consumer of text.  Study the objects before you as if they had arrived from an alien civilization, because they have, you know!  None of these works of literature first were produced and consumed as you now see them in the Norton, and many were printed (or reproduced in manuscript) with multiple colored inks, hand-drawn or wood-block illustrations, and page layouts far different from the Norton's spare "míse-en-page."  And you can bet that the first printed editions of most of these works contained no footnotes.  Why not?

What is "literary" about "literature"? 

        You will notice that early English poetry (c. before 1950?) and prose (c. before 1900) are composed using far more and more complex formal devices.  Poetry usually rhymes and always has meter (consistent rhythm), and it often alliterates, uses metaphors and similes, inverts ordinary sentence construction, and generally presents more difficulties to the modern reader than modern poetry, which almost never rhymes, advances according to a stable meter, or uses complex syntax.  Comparisons, in the form of similes and occasional metaphors, sometimes are the only formal tools modern poets use.  Early English prose also tends to use more rhetorical figures than mere simile or metaphor (click here for a list), and its syntax and word choice often were more complex than the comparatively plain style of much modern English prose.  In brief, "literature" was supposed to differ from the language used in ordinary speech.  To give you a quick test for the "literariness" of early English literature, look for the numbers of times and ways in which it violates H. P. Grice's "Maxims" for ordinary language communication.  Grice, a philosopher of language, was seeking to describe only the rules followed by ordinary speakers and hearers of English discourse, much as we unconsciously follow rules for direction, speed, and eye contact when walking down a crowded city street.  As walking is to dancing, so ordinary speech is to literary composition.  Get ready to dance with the best in the language.

What is early English literature "about" if not the artist's attempt to express him- or herself?

        Modern literature, whether poetry or prose, often seems autobiographical.  Many a first novel or early poem originates in the authors' drive to record in words her/his version of events, feelings, or ideas.  The "honesty" of these works often is praised, suggesting that the culture as a whole is so remarkably corrupt that truth-telling needs the shield of literariness to exist.  Whatever the truth of this speculation, early English literature was produced by authors who were taught to write in ways that discouraged simple, unadorned declarations of truth and that encouraged highly ornate works that connected to or even imitated, with variations, previous works of literature.  Puritan reformers attacked those literary conventions as corrupting lies, but the complex conventions of formal literary style persist even today.  Then, as now, literature was understood as "mimesis," a re-presentation of Nature, but early English literature distinguished itself from ordinary history-writing or legal testimony by its use of dramatic settings implied or explicitly described that destabilized the audience's relationship to the location of the work (e.g., "the seacoast of Bohemia," "a blasted heath," "the Tabard Inn").  Personae, or "masks," were used to populate these settings with characters who resembled but did not merely imitate the actions of actual persons.  When you read early literature, remember that its authors expected you to be curious about the whole world, including its possibilities as well as its actualities, and not just about the authors' lives, which might be fairly dull when compared with "the wrath of Achilles" or how the Wife of Bath tamed five husbands.  Literature WAS "the Internet" of the early English world in that it brought the rest of the universe within the bounds of its sentences, and unlike the typical MySpace or FaceBook page, the topics of interest usually were not to be found in the authors' lives, but rather in the ideas and experiences the works caused to occur in audiences' imaginations.  When you are tempted to interpret a work of literature as "just the author telling us about her/his life," remember the power of imagination and illusion.  Sometimes, when authors seem to be most plainly saying to us, "this is my life," they are inventing most furiously a new identity in which to live.  As in the case of "Ghost Clock," a sculpture appearing to represent a grandfather clock at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., you must remember that, in literature, unless demonstrated otherwise, "there is no clock."