The Longman Anthology of British Literature ─ The Romantics and Their Contemporaries

The Longman Anthology of British Literature is the most comprehensive and thoughtfully arranged text in the field, offering a rich selection of compelling British authors through the ages.

With its first edition, The Longman Anthology of British Literature created a new paradigm for anthologies. Responding to major shifts in literary studies over the past thirty years, it was the first collection to pay sustained attention to the contexts within which literature is produced, even as it broadened the scope of that literature to embrace the full cultural diversity of the British Isles. Within its pages, canonical authors mingle with newly visible writers; English accents are heard next to Anglo-Norman, Welsh, Gaelic, and Scottish ones; female and male voices are set in dialogue; literature from the British Isles is integrated with post-colonial writing; and major works are illumined by clusters of shorter texts that bring literary, social, and historical issues vividly to life.

The Fifth Edition builds on the pioneering features of the previous four editions, expanding the strong core of frequently taught works while continuing to lead the way in responding to the shifting interests of the discipline.

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.

Peter J. Manning is Professor at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Byron and His Fictions and Reading Romantics, and of numerous essays on the British Romantic poets and prose writers. With Susan J. Wolfson, he has co-edited Selected Poems of Byron, and Selected Poems of Beddoes, Hood, and Praed. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats-Shelley Association.

Susan J. Wolfson is Professor of English at Princeton University and is general editor of Longman Cultural Editions. A specialist in Romanticism, her critical studies include The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism, and Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism. She has also produced editions of Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron, Thomas L. Beddoes, William M. Praed, Thomas Hood, as well as the Longman Cultural Edition of Shelley’s Frankenstein. She received Distinguished Scholar Award from Keats-Shelley Association, and grants and fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is President (2009-2010) of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.