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Title: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Package 1: Volumes A-B, Sixth Edition by Nina Baym ISBN: 0-393-97793-5 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: July, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 2 List Price(USD): $66.75 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Not revisionism, breadth
Comment: The reviewer who complains about the great authors being excluded in favour of the mediocre is missing the point. For me, to study American literature is not just to study the great works. Instead, it's to study American literature. That includes slave songs, native American chants, and anything else that was produced with a commitment to art and expression rather than simple commerce. We can't, of course, read everything but have to limit ourselves to reading representitive samples. And those representitive samples will include the great works which should, rightly, dominate. But to exclude the rest of the American works that those great works grew out of is to give, I think, a perverse view of what "American literature" means. Do you read only the flowers or view the field as a whole and see the flowers as they fit into the ecology? Is it a study of American literature or a study of selected great works? Lately, the Norton anthologies have been moving towards the broader view. It may not be what you want to do but to disparage it as unworthy is wrong.
Rating: 3
Summary: More Mathers Please
Comment: Is this all the Mathers you get? What about Jerry and Marshall. And we all know that early American lit is more boring than the late stuff. This anthology would really benefit from some Chuck Palaniak.
My favorite novel included is Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative. I can't imagine how hard it must have been to go without church for all that time. She really had strength.
NOTE ON THE TEXT: If you really love American Lit, you'll find the puritan stuff much more engaging than the 19th Century. I keep a copy of Volume A by my bedside.
Rating: 5
Summary: as Norton understands, all authors endure revisionism
Comment: the reviewer from los angeles is evaluating what he calls a university trend, not these marvelous and comprehensive anthologies. moreover, of the three authors to whom he accords canonical status, cooper (whom twain absolutely reviled) and poe both remain controversial. a teacher of literature myself, i find cooper remarkably unimaginative and intolerably inefficient. His Rivenoak speaks that condescending white-guy version of "plain-ole-injun-talk", praising Natty Bumpo's decency 8 or 10 times in a single numb paragraph. we read cooper because of his influence, not his raw merits. further, cooper, like the astounding melville, was a 1930's revisionist canon re-admission; in fact, joseph conrad was asked to write an introduction to a melville volume and refused, writing back that he saw nothing of value in his writing. meanwhile, countless novels that (in their day) sold many, many times more than any of these folks are simply not read any more. so we've completely revised the canon that way too, judging as disposable most of the literature that real american readers of former times couldn't get enough of. who were the successful authors? hawthorne called them "that damn tribe of scribbling women," which accounts--in the words of a canon fixture himself (and one i utterly venerate)--for what we now ignorantly call "gender studies," and the concommitant revision of antholgies. as for native amnerican authors, we can at least say that cooper would be nowhere without them, and having read them on their own merits we can say much more, and with deep appreciation.
at any rate, norton is expanding their antholgies in size as they add these "other" writers, so that their additions do not come at the expense of the conservative canon. norton offers us the familiar and the recovered side-by side, so we needn't get anxious. their anthology is a thoroughgoing record and celebration of the complete american literary tradition, as it was advanced and read by living americans.
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