The Norton Anthology of English Literature - Format

Format

The eighth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature comprises six volumes, sold in two sets of three. The first set includes the volumes “The Middle Ages,” “The Sixteenth Century and The Early Seventeenth Century,” and “Restoration and the Eighteenth Century;” the second set includes “The Romantic Period,” “The Victorian Age,” and “The Twentieth Century and After.” The writings are arranged by author, with each author presented chronologically by date of birth. Historical and biographical information is provided in a series of headnotes for each author and in introductions for each of the time periods.

Within this structure, the anthology incorporates a number of thematically linked "clusters" of texts pertaining to significant contemporary concerns. For example, "The Sixteenth Century and The Early Seventeenth Century" contains four such clusters under the headings, "Literature of The Sacred," "The Wider World," "The Science of Self and World," and "Voices of the War." The first of these includes four contemporary English translations of an identical passage from the Bible, those of William Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims Version, and the Authorized (King James) Version; selections from the writings of influential Protestant thinkers of the period, including Tyndale, John Calvin, Anne Askew, John Foxe and Richard Hooker; as well as selections from the Book of Common Prayer and the Book of Homilies.