The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces

by Maynard Mack (Editor), John Bierhorst (Editor), Jerome W. Clinton (Editor)

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. These texts have been selected and prepared by expert scholars and translators who are also committed undergraduate teachers. Like all Norton Anthologies, the Expanded Edition in One Volume of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces is foremost a teaching anthology, edited to meet the needs of today’s students discovering a range of literary traditions for the first time.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Classics, Anthologies, Poetry, Reference, Short Stories

3052 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

Reviews

[B. P. Rinehart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredibly dense and maybe the best Norton Anthology I own right now in December of 2019. It stacks an international selection of literature from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Things Fall Apart and actually tries to be fair about it. Given this expanded (it combines earlier separate two volume editions of this title and added more), instructor's copy edition came out during the "Canon Wars" of the end of the 20th century (I talk more about this in my review of The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations), it is amazingly varied and has a lot of representation outside of the United States and Europe (compared to the two-volume edition I mentioned earlier) and while I am always picky about translations, the variety of content in this book is amazing. I brought this book out of my indie bookstore and was glad to find it.

[Krista · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, here's how it happened. You know how there's all the coverage of Hillary-supporters-turned-McCain-supporters? Well, I read some interesting feminist commentary on the issue, and the media coverage thereof, which made me nostalgic for all of those fantastic, tragic, bat$hit crazy female characters I read/loved in college. So, needless to say, I started to crave Medea. One thing lead to another, and I dusted off the old Norton Anthology. Just reading the table of contents brought back a flood of memories of hours spent fighting through painful reading assignments, but now I have the pleasant knowledge that this time I was reading for fun, for my own personal growth and enjoyment, and I don't have to stay up late doing it if I don't want to. Well, I guess that's true of Humanities assignments, but regardless, I had a moment. Anyhoo, this collection is absolutely fantastic, and I plan on exploring it for many, many years. Maybe I'll actually read the full-length masterpieces some day, but for now the abridged versions are perfect for my needs - I like the stories and the language, but am not so ambitious as to want to read the entire Bhagavad Gita right now. The introductions provide a sufficient summary of the historical and cultural contexts, and the footnotes bring you right up to speed with all of the exiles, murders, wars, and prophesies you missed in the edited sections.

[Dusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course, I did not read the entire 3000+ pages in this anthology, which literally spans the more than two millennia between Gilgamesh and Things Fall Apart.

I became well acquainted with about half the book -- the scattered half the professor for whom I TA-ed this semester included in her syllabus. I remain unconvinced that any single-volume anthology can claim to adequately represent the whole world's literature, and there are particular texts whose omission in this volume shock me (where's Malory?!), but I am nevertheless satisfied with the book's success despite its limitations.

In these pages you'll encounter a healthy variety of genres -- epic poem (Gilgamesh & Inferno), lyric poem (Baudelaire), drama (Faust), novel (Things Fall Apart), short story (Woolf's "Unwritten Novel") and essay (Montaigne), etc. -- and an ambitious variety of literary traditions -- ancient Greek (Medea), ancient Sanskrit (Sakuntala), heroic China (Chuang Tsu), Renaissance England (Hamlet), tzarist Russia (Pushkin), post-colonial Latin America (Borges), etc. -- that make this collection both lovable and colossal.

[Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not buy this book. I found it from a personal library of college textbooks, and I picked it up and decided to read it. Not knowing how much a work like this is "worth", I can't recommend it to buy, but I can definitely recommend it to read.

It took me several months to get through the anthology, cover-to-cover, and I never read for more than an hour at a time, and I let the stories and the novels and the poems and the plays sink in -- this is a new way of reading for me, as I would previously just read to rack up pages, in a more transitory way -- and I was rewarded for it. This is a great anthology, because the material it finds its sources from is great. To boot, this anthology is worth reading or perusing just for the plays: Tartuffe, Mother Courage and Her Children, Hamlet, Lysistrata, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Cherry Orchard, Orestes, Oedipus the King, Medea, Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, Faust, Phaedra, and Hedda Gabler, and any I've missed.

[Arthur Sperry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished reading this after a long time! It was worth the effort.

[Ana Mardoll · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces: Vol. 1 / 0-393-96346-2

I own several anthologies for my private library, salvaged from college book sales over the years, and this is definitely one of my favorites. The world literature selections presented here really are from all over the world, and not are predominantly "western" writings. There's quite a bit of material that I haven't seen elsewhere (ancient Egyptian love songs, for example) and the translations are fluid and easy to read. I recommend this anthology for anyone looking to enrich a personal library with world literary selections.

PART 1: BEGINNINGS TO 100 A.D.
- Aeschylus
- Aristophanes
- Aristotle
- Bhagavad-Gita
- Catullus
- Chinese Book of Songs
- Chinese Nine Songs
- Chuang Chou
- Confucius
- Egyptian Poetry
- Epic of Gilgamesh
- Euripides
- Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)
- Homer
- Jataka
- Mahabharata
- Ovid
- Petronius
- Plato
- Ramayana of Valmiki
- Sappho of Lesbos
- Sophocles
- Tamil Anthologies
- Virgil

PART 2: 100 A.D. TO 1500 A.D.
- Abolqasem Ferdowsi
- Amaru
- Augustine
- Basavanna
- Beowulf
- Bhartrhari
- Book of Dede Korkut
- Chandidasa
- Cilappatikaram
- Dante Alighieri
- Epic of Son-Jara
- Everyman
- Faridoddin Attar
- Francois Villon
- Gawain and the Green Knight
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Giovanni Boccaccio
- Govindadasa
- Greek Bible (New Testament)
- Han-Shan
- Ibn Ishaq
- Jalaloddin Rumi
- Kalidasa
- Kanze Kojiro Nobumitsu
- Kokinshu
- Koran
- Li Ch'ing-Chao
- Li Ho
- Li Po
- Li Shang-Yin
- Mahadeviyakka
- Man'yoshu
- Marie de France
- Mirabai
- Murasaki Shikibu
- Po Chu-I
- Sa'di
- Sei Shonagon
- Somadeva
- Song of Roland
- Story of Deirdre
- T'ao Ch'ien
- Tale of the Heike
- Thousand and One Nights
- Tu Fu
- Tu Mu
- Tulsidas
- Vidyapati
- Visnusarman
- Wanderer
- Wang Wei
- Yoshida Kenko
- Yuan Chen
- Zeami Motokiyo

PART 3: 1500 A.D. TO 1650 A.D.
- Cantares Mexicaons
- Castiglione, Baldesar
- de Cervantes, Miguel
- de la Barca, Pedro Calderon
- de Montaigne, Michel
- de Navarre, Marguerite
- Donne, John
- Erasmus, Desiderius
- Florentine Codex
- Machiavelli, Niccolo
- Marlowe, Christopher
- Milton, John
- Petrarch, Francis
- Popul Vuh
- Radelais, Francois
- Shakespeare, William

~ Ana Mardoll

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my text book for a class at LVC and all the selections we explored were not only amazing writing, but historically significant as well. You can see what life was like at the time of each selection's writing as well as the impact it has had since then. I highly recommend this book to everyone who can read because it will open up new worlds and new ways of thinking.

Selections include:
From Beginnings - AD 100:
Gilgamesh, Ancient Egyptian poetry, selections from The Old Testament from the Bible, Homer (Iliad and Odyssey), Sappho of Lesbos, Aeschlyus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Chinese Poetry (early period), Confucius, Indian Literature from the "Heroic Age" (including the Bhagavad-gita), Virgil, Ovid, Petronius

From 100 - 1500:
selections from The New Testament of the Bible, Augustine, Indian Lit from the "Classical Age" (including Bhartrhari), Chinese Prose and Poetry "Middle Period" (includes Tao Chien, Wang Wei, Li Po), Islam and Islamic Lit (including the Koran, Ibn Ishaq, The Thousand and One Nights), "Formation of Western Lit" (Beowulf, The Story of Deirdre, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer), Japanese Poetry and Literature from the Golden Age, Medieval India (devotional lyrics including: to Virasaiva Saints, to Krishna, Hindi), Epic of Son-Jara (Africa: Mali)

From 1500 to 1650:
European Renaissance (includes Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Montaingne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe), Mayan and Aztec (Nahuatl) Prose and Poetry

[Shari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most helpful textbooks I had in college. The collection of stories and poems are wonderful and carefully selected with good introductions. Hard to carry around, though. (It must have weighed a kilo!) But it's a good reference book that I still keep to this day and read once in a while.

[Larry Kenney · Rating 3 out of 5]

My English teacher in High School gave me this book to read Dante's Inferno. To this day, that's still one of my favorite reads. What makes this particular version really good is the footnotes. They explain who the people that are in the story are, and why the author would place them there.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading for a class and really enjoying the selections so far.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

LONG LONG LONG book but well worth reading cover to cover. Most literature textbooks have some great pieces and some that are included gratuitously, but this one is decent.

[RJ]

The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, One Volume, Expanded Edition by Maynard Mack (1997)

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection!

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I read almost this entire book! It's an amazing collection of the best authors from Chaucer to Plato to Hugo. A great book to have on hand.

[Ciara Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love it!

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read "The Epic of Gilgamesh" from here.

[Marsha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phew! What else is there to say after reading a massive tome more than 2,000 pages long? It’s been a fun ride but you’re glad when it’s finished. Containing the works of several well-known (or not-so-well-known) 20th-century authors, this book ranges through various styles with bewildering speed. There is much to pick and choose from, depending on your tastes. Not all of it is palatable or even decipherable. But it’s worth picking through even the initially unfamiliar ones in order to find something new that might appeal.

Even perusing supposedly known works like Marcel Proust’s excerpt from one of his most famous works reveal surprises. He spends quite a few pages detailing what happens before, during and after the oblivion of sleep! I found that a decided soporific, to the point where I nodded off several times before finishing it. But who knows? Someone else might find it, shall we say, absorbing reading.

Riffle through the pages of this anthology. There’s certain to be something you’ll like.

[Debbie Dourte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the required text for World Lit, and I LOVED it. We didn't read ALL of the selections but had lively discussions about the ones chosen.

A favorite was The Shakuntala or the ring of remembrance a play by Kalidasa (Translated) which we read aloud in class. I would LOVE to see it onstage and done with just a touch of humor...

If every Literature class was as inspiring as that one was, I'd have been an English major!

[Bert Piedmont's Book Sale Items]

have both volumes