The new Norton Anthology, by the numbers

Years since the last Norton Anthology: 6. This seems awfully short, and I can't help wondering if we really NEED a new edition at all, but on looking up the publication dates for the last three editions, I guess it is their usual interval.

Versions of the Norton Anthology I will have used in my entire teaching career, once the new one comes out: 3. This is making me feel old.

Number of werewolves, compared to the last edition: +1. Yay! Who doesn't love a werewolf?

Number of plays about living with integrity in a world where the king is old, mad, and capricious, his vicious and venal children and children-in-law are running the kingdom, and the world is lashed by violent storms: -1. I will grant that I would never actually teach Lear in a survey course, and its replacement, Othello, is undoubtedly more accessible, but the timing seems unfortunate.

Number of gay Elizabethan poets with a taste for elaborate mythological allusions and silly wordplay: -1. (What the hell, Norton? Am I the only one who likes Barnfield?)

Number of other texts I will miss: No idea. They mark the stuff that's new with stars, but they don't call attention to the texts that have quietly disappeared. However, it looks like this revision is less of a bloodbath than the last one, in which at least FOUR pieces that I used to teach regularly, including a full-length play that is still under copyright and not available online, suddenly vanished.

Number of texts that survived the axe, but I have no idea why: Several, starting with most of the longer works by nineteenth-century poets. Like, does anybody actually teach Manfred or "The Scholar Gypsy"? (Undoubtedly, after the last edition, some Victorianist somewhere wondered whether anyone actually taught Richard Barnfield. Sigh.)

Number of texts I asked for on Norton's faculty survey that actually made it in: Two! "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" and A Christmas Carol. Woo hoo!

Number of new short stories by contemporary writers whose works I have actually read voluntarily: 3. (I don't know any of the stories, but given that I dislike most contemporary "literary fiction" and haven't really taken to ANY of the Norton's prior selections, this is a hopeful sign.)

The Norton Anthology is dead, long live the Norton Anthology

So, it appears that yet another edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature is on its way. I'm not too sure how I feel about that. Didn't the last one come out only about five years ago? I remember being taken by surprise when I started my first full-time job and realized the one I used in grad school had been replaced.

No more A Room of One's Own, at least not in its entirety. Hello Mrs. Dalloway, instead. No more bringing the Joan Baez CD to class so we can all listen to Mary Hamilton; no more comparing the lists of women writers included in three different editions of the Norton. I'm sure we'll find some other stuff to talk about with Mrs. Dalloway -- who is, for a moment, very nearly a stranger. I don't even remember whether I liked her or not when I was twenty. I suppose I will find out whether I like her now.

No more "Song: Men of England," another piece with a nice musical tie-in.

No more pairing Brian Friel's Translations with Eavan Boland's That the Science of Cartography is Limited. Both gone from the new edition, I shall miss them both. I remember the first time I taught them together, in a classroom with a neglected set of school maps from the mid-twentieth-century shoved in one of the corners. I remember pulling them out of the corner, on an impulse, flipping from map to map, English and French Colonies, Westward Expansion, and Civil War. Asking students what they noticed about the stories the maps told, and the stories they didn't tell. I will miss the end of Translations, with Hugh reading from the Aeneid as the lights go out: as powerful an argument for why stories matter as any I know.

My current Brit Lit II class seems to be left cold by most of these texts, by the way. (They were even left cold when I tried to repeat the map trick; maybe it has to be an ad hoc thing.) Maybe that's just as well; I would have liked my last time teaching them to be filled with fireworks and spark, but this way, I may regret the loss less.

WTFQ, Norton?

So, it seems there is a new edition of the Norton Anthology out. I'm sure everybody in the world knew this except me, but I didn't, because I live under a rock, and in any case I drew up my syllabi for this year before I moved to New SLAC Town, and thus had nowhere to tell people to send desk copies. So I've only just had a chance to look at it.

Wait, what happened to Book 3 of the Faerie Queene? They didn't have the whole thing in there to begin with, but this time around they've totally and completely gutted it, with only three cantos left standing. Book 3 is the fun part, dammit! I don't even like Spenser all that much, but even I like Book 3. Who the hell decided this would be a good idea?

They seem to have deleted Margery Kempe's examination for heresy, too. Growf.

On the bright side, there is an online archive of deleted bits -- which is helpful, and means I don't have to do anything really desperate such as forcing my students to read about that bore Redcrosse -- but browsing it makes for interesting and depressing reading. They've deleted so much fabulous stuff over the years! Mankind! And "Sir Orfeo"! And the Franklin's and Merchant's tales, not to mention Sir Thopas. Substantial chunks of The Tragedy of Mariam seem to have appeared in the last edition and become considerably less substantial in this one; "Lludd and Llewelys" and a couple of Marie de France's fables have appeared and disappeared just as quickly.

Oh well. The Norton is eterne in mutabilitie, I guess. Now I just have to figure out what the heck I'm going to do about Utopia now that they've given the students the whole text instead of excerpts. I'd really like to teach the whole thing. On the other hand, I don't want to not teach all the Spenser I'd planned to cover, or the extra Shakespeare play, or... Yeah, too many great things to read, not enough time. (Most of my professors in undergrad sailed blithely ahead and said, "OK, we're going to read it all," and I was generally with them all the way, so I was well into grad school before I discovered that there are limits to the sort of reading load that most undergraduates are willing to consider reasonable.)

Oh, screw it. I think we're going to read it all.