The Norton Anthology of Poetry


Margaret Ferguson - 1970
    The anthology offers more poetry by women (40 new poets), with special attention to early women poets. The book also includes a greater diversity of American poetry, with double the number of poems by African American, Hispanic, native American and Asian American poets. There are 26 new poets representing the Commonwealth literature tradition: now included are more than 37 poets from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Caribbean, South Africa and India.

4.48 Psychosis


Sarah Kane - 2000
    The struggle of the self to remain intact has moved in her work from civil war, into the family, into the couple, into the individual, and finally into the theatre of phychosis: the mind itself. This play was written in 1999 shortly before the playwright took her own life at age 28. On the page, the piece looks like a poem. No characters are named, and even their number is unspecified. It could be a journey through one person's mind, or an interview between a doctor and his patient.

Miss or Mrs?/ The Haunted Hotel/ The Guilty River


Wilkie Collins - 1993
    Fast-paced and psychologically absorbing, all proceed through a series of dramatic scenes to a climax that in one case at least is literally explosive. These stories, varied in setting and tone, demonstrate Collins's plot-making skill at its most succinct and intricate. Featuring excellent critical apparatus, this edition also includes Collins's original prefaces.

English Romantic Poetry


Stanley Appelbaum - 1996
    Agnes"). For this edition, Stanley Appelbaum has provided a concise Introduction to the Romantic period and brief commentaries on the poets represented. The result is a carefully selected anthology that will be welcomed by lovers of poetry, students and teachers alike.

Evelina


Frances Burney - 1778
    As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions—as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.

The Faerie Queene


Edmund Spenser
    Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united medieval romance and renaissance epic to expound the glory of the Virgin Queen. The poem recounts the quests of knights including Sir Guyon, Knight of Constance, who resists temptation, and Artegall, Knight of Justice, whose story alludes to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Composed as an overt moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queene, with its dramatic episodes of chivalry, pageantry and courtly love, is also a supreme work of atmosphere, colour and sensuous description.

Piers Plowman


William Langland
    E. Talbot Donaldson's translation of the text has been selected for this Norton Critical Edition because of its skillful emulation of the original poem's distinct alliterative verse. Selections of the authoritative Middle English text are also included for comparative analysis. Sources and Backgrounds includes a large collection of contemporary religious and historical documents pertaining to the poem, including selections from the Douai Bible, accounts of the plague, and legal statutes. Criticism includes twenty interpretive essays by leading medievalists, among them E. Talbot Donaldson, George Kane, Jill Mann, Derek Pearsall, C. David Benson, and Elizabeth D. Kirk. A Glossary and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Briggflatts (Book, DVD & CD)


Basil Bunting - 1967
    Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of "BRIGGFLATTS", which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets". Bunting called "BRIGGFLATTS" his 'autobiography'. It is a complex work, drawing on many elements of his life, experience and knowledge, and features the saint Cuthbert and the warrior king Eric Bloodaxe as two opposing aspects of the Northumbrian - and his - character. Its structural models include the sonata form (and Scarlatti's music in particular) and the latticework of the Lindisfarne Gospels, while thematically it recalls Wordsworth's "Prelude". Bunting wrote that 'Poetry, like music, is to be heard.' His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. This new edition includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of "BRIGGFLATTS" in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell's 1982 film portrait of Bunting. As well as his own notes to the poem, the book includes his seminal essay on sound and meaning in poetry, "The Poet's Point of View" (1966). All his poetry is available in "Complet Poems" (Bloodaxe Books, 2000).

Zofloya


Charlotte Dacre - 1806
    The novel follows Victoria's progress from spoilt daughter of indulgent aristocrats, through a period of abuse and captivity, to a career of deepening criminality conducted under Satan's watchful eye. Charlotte Dacre's narrative deftly displays her heroine's movement from the vitalized position of Ann Radcliffe's heroines to a fully conscious commitment to vice that goes beyond that of 'Monk' Lewis's deluded Ambrosio. The novel's most daring aspect is its anatomy of Victoria's intense sexual attraction to her Moorish servant Zofloya that transgresses taboos both of class and race. A minor scandal on its first publication, and a significant influence on Byron and Shelley, Zofloya has been unduly neglected. Contradicting idealized stereotypes of women's writing, the novel's portrait of indulged desire, gratuitous cruelty, and monumental self-absorption retains considerable power to disturb.

Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Early Writings


Christine Alexander - 2010
    Together they invented characters based on heroes and writers such as Wellington, Napoleon, Scott, and Byron, whose feuds, alliances, and love affairs weave an intricate web of social and political intrigue in imaginary colonial lands in Africa and the Pacific Ocean. The writings of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal are youthful experiments in imitation and parody, wild romance and realistic recording - a playful literary world that they would draw upon for their early and later work. In this generous selection, the early writings of the Bronte's are presented together for the first time. Christine Alexander's Introduction explores the rich imaginative lives of the Brontes, and the tension between their maturing authorship and creative freedom. The edition includes Charlotte Bronte's Roe Head Journal, and Emily and Anne's Diary Papers. The edition also has a key to characters and place, detailed notes, and a map of Glass Town and Angria.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Cloud 9


Caryl Churchill - 1979
    The same family appears in Act Two 25 years older and back in London, only now it’s 1979. Cloud 9 is about relationships between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria, and Sex. Cloud 9 premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979 and has since been staged all over the world.

The Major Works


John Dryden - 1956
    His work includes political poems, satire, religious apologias, translations, critical essays and plays. This authoritative edition brings together a unique combination of Dryden's poetry and prose--all the major poems in full, literary criticism, and translations--to give the essence of his work and thinking.The collection includes the poems, MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel as well as Dryden's classical translations; his versions of Homer, Horace, and Ovid are reproduced in full. There are also substantial selections from Dryden's Virgil, Juvenal, and other classical writers. Fables, Ancient and Modern, taken from Chaucer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Homer, his last and possibly greatest work, also appears in full.

Hymns and Fragments


Friedrich Hölderlin - 1983
    Including his late poems in free rhythms from the years between 1801 and 1806, the period just prior to his hospitalization for insanity.

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker


Tobias Smollett - 1771
    This story describes Squire Bramble's tour of the Britain of George III.

Frail-Craft


Jessica Fisher - 2007
    The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”