Building on an innovation introduced in the Seventh Edition, the editors have included for each of the periods several clusters that gather together short texts illuminating the cultural, historical, intellectual, and literary concerns of the age. In the Eighth Edition we have rethought, streamlined, and more closely coordinated these clusters with three aims: to make them easier to teach in the space of a class meeting or two, to make them more lively and accessible, and to heighten their relevance to the surrounding works of literature. Hence, for example, a new cluster for the Middle Ages, "Christ's Humanity," broaches one of the broadest and most explosive cultural and literary movements of the period, a movement that brought forth new kinds of readers and writers and a highly contested cultural politics of the visual. Similarly, a new cluster for the eighteenth century, "Liberty," goes to the heart of a central and momentous contradiction: on the one hand, the period's passionate celebration of liberty as the core British value, and, on the other hand, its extensive and profitable engagement in the slave trade. The implications of this contradiction, as the conjoined texts demonstrate, ripple out through English philosophy, law, and literature. Another new cluster, to take a final example, focuses on the fraught relationship between nation and language in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through the vast extent of the former British Empire and, more recently, through American economic and political power, the English language has displaced or commingled with indigenous languages in many parts of the world. In consequence, imaginative writers from India to Africa, from the Caribbean to Hong Kong, have grappled with the kind of vexed questions about linguistic and national identity that have been confronted by generations of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish writers. The political, psychological, and cultural complexity of these questions is evident in the array of texts brought together in the "Nation and Language" cluster, while their rich literary potential is fully apparent in Brian Friel's powerful play Translations. We supplement the topical clusters for each period by several more extensive topical selections of texts, with illustrations, on the anthology Web site.
Now, as in the past, cultures define themselves by the songs they sing and the stories they love to tell. But the central importance of visual media in contemporary culture has heightened our awareness of the ways in which songs and stories have always been closely linked to the images that societies have fashioned. The Eighth Edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature features sixty pages of color plates (in seven new color inserts). In
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addition, black-and-white engravings and illustrations by Hogarth, Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti provide compelling examples of the hybrid art of the "visual narrative." In selecting visual material�from the Sutton Hoo treasure of the seventh century to Anish Kapoor's immense Marsyas in the twenty-first century�the editors sought to provide images that conjure up, whether directly or indirectly, the individual writers in each section; that relate specifically to individual works in the anthology; and that shape and illuminate the culture of a particular literary period. We have tried to choose visually striking images that will interest students and provoke discussion, and our captions draw attention to important details and cross-reference related texts in the anthology.
Period-by-Period Revisions
The scope of the extensive revisions we have undertaken can be conveyed more fully by a list of some of the principal texts and features that have been added to the Eighth Edition.
The Middle Ages. The period, edited by Alfred David and James Simpson, is divided into three sections: Anglo-Saxon Literature, Anglo-Norman Literature, and Middle English Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. The heart of the Anglo-Saxon section is the great epic Beowidf, in an acclaimed translation, specially commissioned for The Norton Anthology of English Literature, by Seamus Heaney. The selection of Anglo-Saxon texts has been newly augmented with the alliterative poem Judith and with King Alfred's preface to the Pastoral Care. The Anglo-Norman section�a key bridge between the Anglo-Saxon period and the time of Chaucer�-includes two clusters of texts: "Legendary Histories of Britain" traces the origins of Arthurian romance in the accounts of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon. "Celtic Contexts" explores the complex multilingual situation of the period, represented by the Old Irish "Exile of the Sons of Uisliu"; newly added, the conclusion of Thomas of England's Le Roman de Tristan, which comes from Irish, Welsh, and Breton sources and was written down in Old French; and Marie de France's magnificent Breton lay Lanval, one of the period's principal texts, as well as her Chevrefoil, in a new verse translation by Alfred David. A tale from the Confessio Amantis of John Gower, a new author, complements the generous selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. We have added new selections from the remarkable Margery Kempe and from Langland's Piers Plowman and an important new topical cluster, "Christ's Humanity." Our representation of medieval drama has been strengthened by the addition of the powerful York Play of the Crucifixion.
The Sixteenth Century.. For the first time with this edition, the anthology includes the whole of Thomas More's Utopia, the visionary masterpiece that helped to shape the modern world. Edited by George Logan and Stephen Greenblatt, this period includes five other complete longer texts: Book 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Doctor Faustus, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and King Lear. The selection of poems offers new works by Wyatt, five additional sonnets by Sidney, five additional sonnets by Shakespeare, and two sonnets by a poet introduced here for the first time, Richard Barnfield. In addition we provide modern prose translations of several of Petrarch's rime in order to show their close relationship with sonnets by Wyatt, Sidney, and Ralegh. The cluster on the period's bitter religious contro
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versies, "Faith in Conflict," has been redesigned in order to better represent the Catholic as well as the Protestant position. A new cluster, "Women in Power," greatly expands the selections from Queen Elizabeth and sets her writings alongside those of three compelling new figures: Mary Tudor ("Bloody Mary"), Lady Jane Grey, the tragic queen for nine days, and Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's cousin and prisoner. The topic as a whole provides insight into the strange position of female rulers attempting to shape their public performances in a society that ordinarily allowed little scope for women's shaping power.
The Early Seventeenth Century. At the heart of this section, edited by Barbara Lewalski and Katharine Eisaman Maus, is John Milton's Paradise Lost, presented in its entirety. Other complete longer works include John Donne's soul-searching Satire 3, Aemilia Lanyer's country-house poem "The Description of Cookham," three major works by Ben Jonson (The Masque of Blackness, Volpone [freshly edited by Katharine Eisaman Maus], and the Cary-Morison ode), John Webster's tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, and Milton's Lycidas. Significant additions have been made to the works of Donne, Jonson, Bacon, Carew, and Hobbes. Three newly conceived topical clusters will help teachers organize the rich profusion of seventeenth-century texts. "The Gender Wars" offers the stark contrast between Joseph Swetnam's misogynistic diatribe and Bachel Speght's vigorous response. "Forms of Inquiry" represents the vital intellectual currents of the period by bringing together reselected texts by Bacon, Burton, Browne, and Hobbes. And introducing riveting reports on the trial and execution of Charles I, political writings by the conservative Filmer and the revolutionaries Milton and Winstanley, and searching memoirs by Lucy Hutchinson, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Lady Anne Halkett, and Dorothy Waugh, "Crisis of Authority" shows how new literary forms arose out of the trauma of political conflict.