The Norton Anthology of English | Preface to the Eighth Edition
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| what is literature in english |
The Norton england Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1 The Middle Ages through the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
The outpouring of English literature overflows all boundaries, including the capacious boundaries of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
But these pages manage to contain many of the most remarkable works written in English during centuries of restless creative effort.
We have included epic poems and short lyrics; love songs and satires; tragedies and comedies written for performance on the commercial stage, and private meditations meant to be perused in silence; prayers, popular ballads, prophecies, ecstatic visions, erotic fantasies, sermons, short stories, letters in verse and prose, critical essays, polemical tracts, several entire novels, and a great deal more. Such works generally form the core of courses that are designed to introduce students to English literature, with its history not only of gradual development, continuity, and dense internal echoes but also of sudden change and startling innovation.
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One of the joys of literature in English is its spectacular abundance.
Even within the geographical confines of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, where the majority of texts brought together in this collection originated, one can find more than enough distinguished and exciting works to fill the pages of this anthology many times over.
The abundance is all the greater if one takes, as the editors of these volumes do, a broad understanding of the term literature.
In the course of several centuries, the meaning of the term has shifted from the whole body of writing produced in a particular language to a subset of that writing consisting of works that claim special attention because of their unusual formal beauty or expressive power.
Certain literary works, arousing enduring admiration, have achieved sufficient prominence to serve as widespread models for other writers and thus to constitute something approximating a canon.
But just as in English-speaking countries there have
never been academies empowered to regulate the use of language, so too there have never been firmly settled guidelines for canonizing particular texts.
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Any individual text's claim to attention is subject to constant debate and revision; established texts are jostled both by new arrivals and by previously neglected claimants, and the boundaries between the literary english literature and whatever is thought to be "nonliterary" are constantly challenged and redrawn.
The heart of this collection consists of poems english poem, plays, and prose fiction, but, like the language in which they are written, these categories are themselves products of ongoing historical transformations and we have included many texts that call into question any conception of literature as only a limited set of particular kinds of writing.
English literature as a field arouses not a sense of order but what Yeats calls "the emotion of multitude."