Edited by scholars, translators and teachers of the literary traditions represented, The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces , Expanded Edition, offers nearly 3,000 pages per volume of the world's greatest literary landmarks, from early Egyptian love poetry to Chinua Achebe's stunning Things Fall Apart . Prized by teachers and students throughout the U.S. and Canada, this anthology is also the perfect introduction to the splendor of world literature for the lay reader.
I happened upon this book while at work and no one claimed it from the lost and found box after many many months. I have yet to read anything from it, but as I loved what I read from Volume 1, I have no doubt I will find these selections also amazing.
PART I 1650 TO 1800 Vernacular Literature in China Wu Ch'eng-En, Cao Xueqin The Ottoman Empire Evliya Celebi The Enlightenment in Europe Jean-Baptiste Moliere, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire The Rise of Popular Arts in Premodern Japan Matsuo Basho, Ueda Akinari
PART II 1800 TO 1900 Revolution and ROmanticism in Europe and America Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Von Goethe, Keats, Victor Hugo, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville Urdu Lyric Poetry in India Ghalib Realism, Symbolism and European Realities Gustave Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Chekov
PART III THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: SELF AND OTHER IN GLOBAL CONTEXT Navajo Night Chant, Freud, Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Various Inuit Songs, D.H. Lawrence, Zuni Ritual Poetry, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Yehuda Amichai, Derek Walcott, Murakami Haruki
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a literature student. The World masterpieces is a bit hard to read at first, but once you get into the book, you'll appreciate it.