Letter in Response to Roundtable Reviews of The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Editor's note: Pedagogy invited the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature to respond to the roundtable on anthologies in the journal's first issue. That roundtable featured a discussion of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Longman Anthology of British Literature (2000). In that discussion, David Damrosch, general editor of the Longman Anthology, was featured; the following is the Norton Anthology editor's reply.

As associate general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, seventh edition, I want to thank the participants in Pedagogy's dialogue on teaching anthologies. Mike Abrams and I greatly appreciate what was said about the utility of our new edition and are gratified by the response to our focus on language and to our addition of such new texts as Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. But as a teacher of undergraduates who recently had to write a syllabus for English 10A ("Major British Writers I"), I am struck by several things on which the reviewers did not comment. I want in particular to draw attention to three features of the Norton Anthology that I think broadly signal the future of teaching anthologies.

The core of my course, not surprisingly, consisted of selections from the printed text. But in addition to these assignments, the course could offer:

Norton Topics Online

For each historical period, three topical groupings of fully annotated and carefully edited texts are made available on-line, without crowding out the more centrally literary texts in the printed anthology. The units of on-line text may address larger historical issues relevant to the culture of the time or focus more sharply on the contexts of a single work. Hence, for example, when I teach Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, I can have some of my students read the police report on Marlowe filed by the Elizabethan spy Richard Baines, along with a contemporary account of Marlowe's murder. I can ask others to compare scenes from the two texts of Doctor Faustus, conveniently laid out side by side on the screen, and to comment on a selection from the German text Marlowe used as his principal source. And I can ask a third group to read the Elizabethan account of another conjurer, Doctor Fian, along with a sample of Reginald Scot's great skeptical debunking of magic.

For years I struggled with the problem of making good on the promise of a more contextual understanding of literature. I could do the work myself in the library, but I had difficulty translating that work into effective pedagogy. Now, with 21 topical groupings, 1,000 illustrations displayed on-line with a brilliance and detail impossible in reproductions on the printed page, some 250 explorations designed to stimulate critical thinking and generate paper topics, and annotated links to related sites, the Norton Topics Online makes it possible to have it both ways: my students can focus sharply on the great works of literature, presented clearly on the page, and at the same time plunge at will into the rich cultural matrix from which the work emerged.

Norton Online Archive

Part of the challenge of any anthology, and certainly a major challenge in dramatically revising the Norton Anthology, is what we might call textual triage. The books are already about as long as they can plausibly be, if we hope that our students will actually lug them around. This means that if we make significant additions, for example, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own or stories by V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Anita Desai, we are obliged to take other things out. We can mark for excision works that are used less frequently than others. But this process is potentially quite painful, for many of us are fiercely loyal to works that may find themselves on the cutting-room floor. Moreover, though we try as much as possible to include works in their entirety, the length...