The Norton Anthology of American Literature [antikvár]

Preface This Shorter Edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature has been prepared for the convenience of teachers who wish to have all the materials for a course within the covers of a single volume. The book, distilled from the rich resources of the parent volume, is designed to serve either a short course in American literature or else a longer course in which a "core" anthology is to be supplemented by a number of individual texts. Teachers of both types of course will find in this Shorter Edition the essential authors and selections, from the earliest years to the present, that they wish to teach, together with a useful reorganization of the materials and succinct and up-to-date editorial aids necessary for an adequate understanding of the text. All sections of the anthology have been freshly conceived. We have dropped the traditional period names and have discontinued the practice of organizing writers according to "influences" and "schools." In our simplified arrangement, we merely assign time-span titles to the six sections into which the book is divided, and with very few exceptions, we arrange all the authors chronologically by date of birth. This change eliminates period labels, group labels, and topic labels that encourage students to prejudge the literature, and permits teachers the utmost flexibility in organizing their own courses. Thus—to single out the most important instance—Whit-man and Dickinson simply appear in their appropriate chronological places in the section entitled "American Literature 1820-1865." One of the most important innovations is that the editors have, for the first time, given proper attention to the diverse and significant achievements of recent American writing. They have, therefore, subdivided the usual standard but amorphous category "twentieth-century literature." The section "American Literature between the Wars 1914-1945" recognizes that these three decades are a definable literar}- span with its own literary history. The body of literature since World War II has, in its turn, been divided into separate sections of prose and poetry. This division has enabled the editors to write introductions and other editorial aids as well as to make their selections in such a way as to assist students in understanding the movements, trends, and careers in contemporary prose