Highlights
37 Complete Longer Works
The Seventh Edition includes more complete major works than any other anthology of American literature. Nine of these appear for the first time: Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography; Hannah Foster, The Coquette; Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (never before in a survey anthology); Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; Abraham Cahan, The Imported Bridegroom; Willa Cather, My Antonia; Raymond Chandler, Red Wind; Sam Shepard, True West; Louise Glück, October.
View the list of Complete Longer Works
34 New Authors; Strengthened Classic Writers
With 34 new writers represented in depth, the Seventh Edition offers greater diversity, notably of works by women writers and writers of many ethnic, racial, and regional origins. At the same time, it provides expanded representation of many central figures—Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson, among others. Headnotes for these and many other frequently-assigned writers have been rewritten to reflect the changes in selections.
Lecture-Length Contextual Clusters
The Seventh Edition introduces twelve in-text clusters that illuminate cultural, historical, intellectual, and literary concerns. Bringing into conversation markedly diverse voices—48 new to the anthology—on compelling topics such as “Slavery, Race, and the Making of American Literature” or “Writing in a Time of Terror: September 11, 2001,” these carefully constructed clusters are designed to be taught in a class period or two. Cluster headnotes, as well as “Teaching Strategy” sections in the Instructor’s Guide, suggest ways that the selections can work together as a unit.
Newly merged “American Literature since 1945”
A major organizational change, “American Literature since 1945” for the first time combines poetry and prose to give a more accurate presentation of the writers themselves, many of whom wrote in multiple genres. A substantially revised period introduction and refreshed headnotes provide a more nuanced, vital picture of the postwar literary scene.
Reconsidered Native American Traditions
Two new clusters—“Native Americans: Contact and Conflict (1700-1820)” and “Native Americans: Struggle and Survival (1820-1865)”—provide a more coherent framework for teaching early Native oratory and writing. In addition, the Seventh Edition offers more works by Native women writers, with two new writers, Sarah Winnemucca and Jane Johnson Schoolcraft, and expanded selections by Zitkala-Sa.
Color Plates
The Seventh Edition features forty pages of color plates in five new color inserts. More than 50 images—paintings, engravings, architecture, photography, textiles, site-specific art—relate to and cross-reference literary works in the anthology. In addition, new graphic works—a segment from Art Spiegelman’s canonical graphic novel Maus and from the colonial children’s classic, The New-England Primer, a facsimile page from Eliot’s The Waste Land, a facsimile page of Emily Dickinson manuscript, an original illustration from Twain’s Roughing It—open possibilities for teaching visual texts.
Extensively Revised Apparatus
Period introductions, headnotes, footnotes, and bibliographies in the Seventh Edition have been extensively updated to reflect recent scholarship and in some cases rewritten to be clearer and more accessible to undergraduate readers. Thousands of annotations and glosses have been fine-tuned. Selected Bibliographies have been thoroughly updated, and General Resources Bibliographies categorized by Reference Works, Histories, and Literary Criticism, have been added for every period.
Copyright © 2006, W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
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