The Norton Anthology of English Literature / Wuthering Heights

Norton Anthology of English Literature

by M.H. Abrams, Emily Brontë

The Sixth Edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature continues to be the indispensable anthology. Like its predecessors, the Sixth Edition offers the best in English literature from the classic to the contemporary in a readable, teachable format. More selections by women and twentieth-century writers, a richer offering of contextual writings, apparatus fully revised to reflect today's scholarship, and a new larger trim size make the Sixth Edition the choice for breadth, depth, and quality. This paperback edition of the Norton Anthology is packaged with Wuthering Heights , a separate paperback volume including the full text of Bronte's classic.

Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

Meyer Howard Abrams is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. In a powerful contrast, Abrams shows that until the Romantics, literature was usually understood as a mirror, reflecting the real world, in some kind of mimesis; but for the Romantics, writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world. Under Abrams' editorship, the Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.

Abrams was born in a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. He went into English because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession, so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy." After earning his baccalaureate in 1934, Abrams won a Henry fellowship to the University of Cambridge, where his tutor was I.A. Richards. He returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935 and received his Masters' degree in 1937 and his PhD in 1940. During World War II, he served at the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard. He describes his work as solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment by establishing military codes that are highly audible and inventing selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University. As of March 4th, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there.