Research & Innovation

This groundbreaking Norton Anthology offers the best of the literatures of India, China, Japan, the Middle East, Africa, and native America alongside the masterpieces of the Western tradition.

In these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of travel itself. James's enthusiastic appreciation of the unparalleled aesthetic allure of Venice, the vitality of Rome, and the noisy, sensuous appeal of Naples is everywhere marked by pervasive regret for the disappearance of the past and by ambivalence concerning the transformation of nineteenth-century Europe. John Auchard's lively introduction and extensive notes illuminate the surprising differences between the historical, political, and artistic Italy of James's travels and the metaphoric Italy that became the setting of some of his best-known works of fiction. This edition includes an appendix of James's book reviews on Italian travel-writing.

(Revised edition of 1976 and 1980 editions.) Black-Eyed Susans was reviewed in Ms. magazine (March 1976) by Joyce Carol Oates.  

We've all been taught that history is the story of great events and important people—but is it, really? In this illuminating collection of essays, Michael Olmert explores how the most ordinary artifacts of everyday life can reveal a huge amount information about how history actually works. For example:

• Toothbrushes—how they eased civilization into the Industrial Revolution
• Playing Cards—how the technology of printing cards led to Gutenberg's Bible
• Keys—why these little metal objects have been a symbol of power and authority throughout the ages.
• Pets—why black cats were considered dangerous omens, while white ones were thought to be stupid.

How have these little things affected us, and what role does their history play in ours? Olmert forces us to take another look at the odds and ends of life we so often take for granted. Whimsical, witty, and highly informative, Milton's Teeth and Ovid's Umbrella holds the key through the back door and into the kitchen of history — where people really lived.

In this wholly original study, Wyatt uses the metaphor of fire to tell the story of California. Wyatt focuses on this catastrophic history of his native state on five events of social combustion and tangible fire that swept through California, altering its physical and political landscape and the way both were represented in art and literature. Wyatt begins with the accidental importation and spread of the wild oat in the 1770s, a process that had its human parallel in the Spanish invaders. He then explores the impact of four other significant events: the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and fire, and the post-World War II defense-industry boom, and the fire of race that erupted in Watts in 1965. From the the journals of a Gold Camp mineress to Amy Tan's novels, from Ansel Adams's photography to Roman Polanski's films, Wyatt brings into dialogue a wide range of powerful, moving voices.

Written shortly after Jack London's return from the goldfields of the Klondike in 1898, these stories bring to life the harrowing hardships and rugged codes of behavior by which men defined themselves in the lawless wilderness. Like the characters in the popular dime novels of the time, London's heroes display such manly virtues as courage, loyalty, and steadfastness as they confront the merciless frozen expanses of the north. Yet London breaks free of stereotypical figures and one-dimensional plots to explore deeper psychological and social questions of self-mastery, masculinity, and racial domination. Northland Stories comprises nineteen of Jack London's greatest short works.

Berlin provides an informative and fresh commentary on the Book of Esther, locating as diaspora literature and interrogating its comedy. Berlin's commentary, which accompanies the Hebrew biblical text and the JPS translation. It includes essays entitled "When and Where Was the Book of Esther Written?"; "Sex and Spies"; and "Rabbinic Interpretation."

What happens when, in the wake of postmodernism, the old enterprise of bibliography, textual criticism, or scholarly editing crosses paths and processes with visual and cultural studies? In Reimagining Textuality, major scholars (Jerome McGann, David Greetham, Johanna Drucker, et al) map out a new discipline, drawing on and redirecting a host of subfields concerned with the production, distribution, reproduction, consumption, reception, archiving, editing, and sociology of texts.

Passage of the first copywright law in 1710 marked a radical change in the perception of authorship. According to Laura J. Rosenthal, the new construction of the author as the owner of literary property bore different consequences for women than for men, for amateurs than for professionals, and for playwrights than for other authors. Rosenthal explores distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of literary appropriation in drama from 1650 to 1730. In considering the alleged plagiarists Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Colley Cibber, and Susanna Centlivre, Rosenthal maintains that accusations had less to do with the degree of repetition in texts than with the gender of the authors and the cultural location of the plays. Questions of literary property, then, became not just legal matters but part of a discourse aimed at conferring or withholding cultural authority.

Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double investigates the poetics of audience response. Approaching tragedy through the rhythms of spectatorial engagement and detachment ("aesthetic distance"), Kent Cartwright provides a performance-oriented and phenomenological perspective. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double analyzes the development of the tragic audience as it oscillates between engagement—an immersion in narrative, character, and physical action—and detachment—a consciousness of its own comparative judgments, its doubts, and of acting and theatricality. Cartwright contends that the spectator emerges as a character implied and acted upon by the play. He supports his theory with close readings of individual plays from the perspective of a particular element of spectatorial response: the carnivalesque qualities of Romeo and Juliet; the rhythm of similitude, displacement, and wonder in the audience's relationships to Hamlet; aesthetic distance as scenic structure in Othello; the influence of secondary characters and ensemble acting on the Quarto King Lear; and spectatorship as action itself in Antony and Cleopatra.