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About the Anthologies
Introduction
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Second Edition
The Longman Anthology of British Literature is the most comprehensive and thoughtfully arranged text in the field, offering a rich selection of compelling British authors through the ages.
With its first edition, The Longman Anthology of British Literature created a new paradigm for anthologies. Responding to major shifts in literary studies over the past twenty-five years, it was the first collection to pay sustained attention to the contexts within which literature is produced, even as it broadened the scope of that literature to embrace the full cultural diversity of the British Isles. Within its pages, canonical authors mingle with newly visible writers; English accents are heard next to Anglo-Norman, Welsh, Gaelic, and Scottish ones; female and male voices are set in dialogue; literature from the British Isles is integrated with post-colonial writing; and major works are illumined by clusters of shorter texts that bring literary, social, and historical issues vividly to life.
Fresh and up-to-date introductions and notes are written by an editorial team whose members are all actively engaged in teaching and in current scholarship, and one hundred illustrations show both artistic and cultural developments from the medieval period to the present.
The Second Edition builds on the pioneering features of its predecessor, retaining a strong core of frequently taught works while continuing to lead the way in responding to the shifting interests of the discipline.
New to the Second Edition!
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Plays new to this edition include The York Play of the Crucifixion, Mankind, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and The Tempest, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Shaw’s Pygmalion, and Churchill’s Cloud 9.
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New prose work includes selections from Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies, Mary Shelley’s The Swiss Peasant, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (complete).
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New Poetic offerings include a selection of Early Irish Verse, poems by Thomas Campion and Michael Drayton, more works by Shakespeare and Robert Herrick, Byron’s Manfred, Edward Fitzgerald’s "The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám," selections by Lewis Carroll, and an expanded range of 20th-century poets, including Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, and Thom Gunn.
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A gripping new verse translation of "Beowulf" by Alan Sullivan and Tim Murphy -- the first contemporary translation to capture the vital rhythms and alliteration of Anglo-Saxon verse.
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New Perspectives groupings of works in cultural context. Topics and Perspectives groupings new to this edition include Medieval Allegory and Religion and Repression (in the Middle Ages), England in the New World (in the Early Modern period), The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Picturesque (in the Romantic period), The Culture of Childhood (in the Victorian period), and Regendering Modernism (in the Twentieth Century period).
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Expanded illustration program. Illuminating both artistic and cultural developments from the medieval period to the present, Volume One contains 29 new, full-color plates, and Volume Two includes an insert of 30 new full-color plates, in addition to the 50 illustrations per volume in the current edition.’
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