The Longman Anthology of British Literature ─ The Middle Ages/The Early Modern Period/The Restoration and the 18th Century

The first in a two-volume set, this anthology brings together poetry, prose, and drama from the literary history of Great Britain, focusing on the Middle Ages through the Restoration and the eighteenth century, from Beowulf to Samuel Johnson. Damrosch (comparative literature, Harvard U.) and Dettmar (English, Pomona College) group readings chronologically and according to issues and themes like women and gender, related cultural debates, or texts in which later authors respond to their precursors. Also included are writings providing social context, color plates showing images that influenced literary creation, introductions containing historical context, and notes for each text. Major and lesser known authors like Sir Thomas Wyatt are included. This edition has new thumbnail sketches of daily life during each period, new texts by William Baldwin, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, John Donne, John Skelton, and others, the Irish epic The Tain Bo Cuailnge, new translations and groupings, and new response pairings. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

David Damrosch is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, and has written widely on world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature, 2/e (2009) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009).

Kevin J. H. Dettmar is W. M. Keck Professor and Chair, Department of English, at Pomona College, and Past President of the Modernist Studies Association. He is the author of The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism and Is Rock Dead?, and the editor of Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism; Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading; Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics; the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners; and The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, and co-general editor of The Longman Anthology of British Literature.

Christopher Baswell is A. W. Olin Chair of English at Barnard College, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His interests include classical literature and culture, medieval literature and culture, and contemporary poetry. He is author of Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the "Aeneid" from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer, which won the 1998 Beatrice White Prize of the English Association. He has held fellowships from the NEH, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Clare Carroll is Director of Renaissance Studies at The Graduate Center, City University of New York and Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College and at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research is in Renaissance Studies, with particular interests in early modern colonialism, epic poetry, historiography, and translation. She is the author of The Orlando Furioso: A Stoic Comedy, and editor of Richard Beacon's humanist dialogue on the colonization of Ireland, Solon His Follie. Her most recent book is Circe's Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland. She has received Fulbright Fellowships for her research and the Queens College President's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at The University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of books, including Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), which was awarded the 2006 Sixteenth-Century Society Conference Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature; Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540-1625 (1998); and Spenser's Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl (1997). He has also edited a number, most recently, with Matthew Dimmock, Religions of the Book: Co-existence and Conflict, 1400-1660 (2008), and with Raymond Gillespie, The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 (2006). He is a regular reviewer for the TLS.

Heather Henderson is a freelance writer and former Associate Professor of English Literature at Mount Holyoke College. A specialist in Victorian literature, she is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the author of The Vi