Highlights
16 complete longer texts, 2 new—more than any other shorter survey anthology
The Norton Anthology of American Literature includes more major works in their entirety than does any other anthology of American literature. For instructors concerned with the cost of individual works, the Shorter Seventh Edition expands its offerings of complete texts from the most widely assigned writers and for the most widely assigned works in the survey course.
View the list of Complete Longer Works
23 Diverse New Authors; Strengthened Classic Writers
With 34 new writers represented in depth, the Seventh Edition offers more works by women writers and writers of diverse ethnic, racial, and regional origins, among them contemporary authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Julia Alvarez, as well as earlier figures such as Sterling A. Brown, Pauline Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Frances E. W. Harper. At the same time, the Shorter Seventh Edition expands the representation of many central figures—Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson, among others.
Lecture-Length Contextual Clusters
The Shorter Seventh Edition introduces six in-text clusters that illuminate cultural, historical, intellectual, and literary concerns. Bringing into conversation markedly diverse voices—32 new to the anthology—on key issues such as “Slavery, Race, and the Making of American Literature,” or key literary movements such as “Realism and Naturalism”—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. Clusters are noted in in the table of contents.
Newly merged “Literature since 1945”
In a major organizational change, “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 updated and revised headnotes provide a more nuanced, vital picture of the postwar literary scene.
Reconsidered Native American Traditions
Two new clusters—“Native Americans: Contact and Conflict” and “Native Americans: Resistance and Removal”—provide a more coherent framework for teaching early Native oratory and writing. In addition, the Shorter Seventh Edition offers more works by Native writers, with new writers Sarah Winnemucca and Sherman Alexie and expanded selections by Zitkala-Sâ.
Color Plates
The Seventh Edition features forty pages of color plates in five new color inserts. More than 50 images—paintings, engravings, photographs, textiles, posters—relate to and cross-reference literary works in the anthology. In addition, a facsimile page an Emily Dickinson manuscript and an original illustration from Twain’s Roughing It open possibilities for teaching texts and images.
Extensively Revised Apparatus
Period introductions, headnotes and footnotes, and bibliographies in the Shorter Seventh Edition have been 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 newly added for every period.
Copyright © 2006, W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
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