The Fourth Edition of The Longman Anthology of British Literature continues its tradition of presenting works in the historical context in which they were written. This fresh approach includes writers from the British Isles, underrepresented female authors, "Perspectives" sectionsthatshed light on the period as a whole and link with immediately surrounding works to help illuminate a theme, "And Its Time" clusters that illuminate a specific cultural moment or a debate to which an author is responding, and "Responses" in which later authors respond to one or more texts from earlier works. New to Volume 1A is the inclusion of new Penguin Classics translations of Beowulf by Michael Alexander and Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight by Brian Stone and the major classic work The Táin.
David Damrosch is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, and has written widely on world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature, 2/e (2009) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009).
Kevin J. H. Dettmar is W. M. Keck Professor and Chair, Department of English, at Pomona College, and Past President of the Modernist Studies Association. He is the author of The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism and Is Rock Dead?, and the editor of Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism; Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading; Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics; the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners; and The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, and co-general editor of The Longman Anthology of British Literature.
Christopher Baswell isA. W. Olin Chair of English at Barnard College, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His interests include classical literature and culture, medieval literature and culture, and contemporary poetry. He is author of Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the "Aeneid" from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer, which won the 1998 Beatrice White Prize of the English Association. He has held fellowships from the NEH, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Anne Howland Schotter is Professor and Chair of English and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Wagner College. She is the co-editor of Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett and author of articles on Middle English poetry, Dante, and Medieval Latin poetry. Her current interests include the medieval reception of classical literature, particularly the work of Ovid. She has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson and Andrew W. Mellon foundations.
