Table of Contents
48 new selections in all genres, 42 by contemporary writers
The Norton Introduction
to Literature
Preface for Instructors
New to the Fifteenth Edition
New and Expanded Resources for Students and Instructors Hallmark Features of The Norton Introduction to Literature
Acknowledgements
Introduction
What Is Literature?
What Does Literature Do?
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
What Are the Genres of Literature?
Why Read Literature?
Why Study Literature?
Hai-Dang Phan, My Father’s “Norton Introduction to Literature,” Third Edition (1981)
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Hai- Dang Phan
John Crowe Ransom, Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
PART ONE: FICTION
1. Fiction: Reading, Responding, Writing
Telling Stories: Interpretation
Anonymous, The Elephant in the Village of the Blind
Reading and Responding to Fiction
Linda Brewer, 20/20
SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation and Notes on “20/20”
Key Concepts
Fiction and Nonfiction
Writing about Fiction
Isabel Allende, And of Clay Are We Created
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Isabel Allende
SAMPLE WRITING: Reading Notes on “And of Clay Are We Created”
SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on “And of Clay Are We Created”
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on “And of Clay Are We Created”
Telling Stories: An Album
Louise Erdich, The Plague of Doves
A. S. Byatt, The Thing in the Forest
Tim O'Brien, The Lives of the Dead
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
2. Plot
Plot versus Action, Sequence, and Subplot
Pace
Conflicts
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Shroud
The Five Parts of Plot
Common Plot Types
Ralph Ellison, King of the Bingo Game
Chimamanda Ngozi Adchie, Apollo
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Viet Thanh Nguyen, I’d Love You to Want Me
NEW Rebecca Makkai, The November Story
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on “King of the Bingo Game”
Initiation Stories: An Album
William Faulkner, Barn Burning
Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Toni Cade Bambara
Alice Munro, Boys and Girls
Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Octavia E. Butler
3. Narration and Point of View
Types of Narration
Tense
Narrator versus Implied Author
Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat
George Saunders, Puppy
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: George Saunders
NEW Lauren Groff, The Wind
NEW Ted Chiang, The Great Silence
NEW SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on “Puppy”
NEW The “You” Turn: An Album
Jamil Jan Kochai, Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jamil Jan Kochai
NEW Tommy Orange, The State
Jamica Kincaid, Girl
NEW Deesha Philyaw, How to Make Love to a Physicist
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Deesha Philyaw
4. Character
Heroes and Villains versus Protagonists and Antagonists
Major versus Minor Characters
Flat versus Round and Static versus Dynamic Characters
Stock Characters and Archetypes
Reading Character in Fiction and Life
NEW Toni Morrison, Sweetness
David Foster Wallace, Good People
Junot Díaz, Wildwood
NEW Ling Ma, G
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Ling Ma
Monsters: An Album
Margaret Atwood, Lusus Naturae
Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Jorge Luis Borges, The House of Asterion
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jorge Luis Borges
5. Setting
Temporal and Physical, General and Particular Setting
Functions of Setting
Vague and Vivid Settings
Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities
Traditional Expectations of Time and Place
James Joyce, Araby
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Volar
Yiyun Li, A Flawless Silence
NEW Mohsin Hamid, Of Windows and Doors
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Mohsin Hamid
SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation and Close Reading of “Araby”
The Future: An Album
William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: William Gibson
Ray Bradbury, The Veldt
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Ray Bradbury
Zadie Smith, Meet the President!
6. Symbolism and Figurative Language
Literary Symbolism
Figures of Speech and Sound Devices
Interpreting Symbolism and Figurative Language
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birth-Mark
Edwidge Danticat, A Wall of Fire Rising
Haruki Murakami, Barn Burning
SAMPLE WRITING: Comparative Essay on “The Birth-Mark” and “The Thing in the Forest”
7. Theme
Aesop, The Two Crabs
Theme(s): Singular or Plural?
Be Specific: Theme as Idea versus Topic or Subject
Don’t Be Too Specific: Theme as General Idea
Theme versus Moral
Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children
Sandra Cisneros, Mericans
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Sandra Cisneros
NEW Anthony Veasna So, We Would’ve Been Princes!
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Anthony Veasna So
Cross-Cultural Encounters: An Album
Bharati Mukherjee, The Management of Grief
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Bharati Mukherjee
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jhumpa Lahir
David Sedaris, Jesus Shaves
EXPLORING CONTEXTS
8. The Author's Work as Context: Flannery O'Connor
Biographical Approaches to Literature
Implied Author or Narrator
Style and Tone
Three Stories by Flannery O’Connor
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Good Country People
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Passages from Flannery O’Connor’s Essays
From The Fiction Writer and His Country
From The Nature and Aim of Fiction
From Writing Short Stories
From On Her Own Work
From Novelist and Believer
Passages from Flannery O’Connor’s Letters
Critical Excerpts
Mary Gordon, from Flannery’s Kiss
Ann E. Reuman, from Revolting Fictions: Flannery O’Connor’s Letter to Her Mother
Eileen Pollack, from Flannery O’Connor and the New Criticism: A Response to Mark McGurl
Louise Erdrich: An Album
Love Medicine
The Years of My Birth
9. Cultural and Historical Contexts: Women in Turn-of-the-Century America
Women at the Turn of the Century: An Overview
Women Writers in a Changing World
Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Susan Glaspell, A Jury of Her Peers
NEW Anzia Yezierska, Wings
Contextual Excerpts
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from Similar Cases; from Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution
Barbara Boyd, from Heart and Home Talks: Politics and Milk
Mrs. Arthur Lyttelton, from Women and Their Work
Rheta Childe Dorr, from What Eight Million Women Want
The New York Times, from Mrs. Delong Acquitted
The Washington Post, from The Chances of Divorce
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper
The Washington Post, The Rest Cure from Egotism of the Rest Cure
10. Critical Contexts: Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Critical Excerpts
Steve Kaplan, from The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
Lorrie N. Smith, from “The Things Men Do”: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O’Brien’s Esquire Stories
Susan Farrell, from Tim O’Brien and Gender: A Defense of The Things They Carried
READING MORE FICTION
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
Raymond Carver, Cathedral
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants
Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist
Amy Tan, A Pair of Tickets
Eudora Welty, Why I Live at the P.O
PART TWO: POETRY
11. Poetry" Reading, Responding, Writing
Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus
Defining Poetry
Lydia Davis, Head, Heart
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Billy Collins
The Prose Poem
Campbell McGrath, My Library
Ada Limón, Sacred Objects
Poetic Subgenres and Kinds
Eavan Boland, Quarantine
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Eavan Boland
Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid
William Wordsworth, I wandered lonely as a cloud
Elisa Gonzalez, In Quarantine, I Reflect on the Death of Ophelia
Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America
Emily Dickinson, The Sky is low—the Clouds are mean
Billy Collins, Divorce
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
Robert Hayden, A Letter from Phillis Wheatley
Responding to Poetry
Aphra Behn, On Her Loving Two Equally
Writing about Poetry
SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on “On Her Loving Two Equally”
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on “On Her Loving Two Equally”
The Art of (Reading) Poetry: An Album
Howard Nemerov, Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry
Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica
Elizabeth Alexander, Ars Poetica #100: I Believe
Marianne Moore, Poetry
Julia Alavarez, “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen”?
Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry
Octavio Paz, Proem
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
12. Speaker: Whose Voice Do We Hear?
Narrative Poems and Their Speakers
Etheridge Knight, Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
Speakers in the Dramatic Monologue
A. E. Stallings, Hades Welcomes His Bride
The Lyric and Its Speaker
NEW Louise Erdich, Indian Boarding School: The Runaways
William Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Poems for Further Study
Walt Whitman, I celebrate myself, and sing myself
Philip Schultz, Googling Ourselves
Lucille Clifton, cream of wheat
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway
NEW Dylan Seuss-Brakeman, Freelance artist. That’s what you say . . .
NEW Jerico Brown, As a Human Being
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jericho Brown
Exploring Gender: An Album
Richard Lovelace, Song: To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
Lady Mary Chudleigh, To the Ladies
Wilfred Owen, Disabled
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, I Sit and Sew
Elizabeth Bishop, Exchanging Hats
David Wagoner, My Father’s Garden
Judith Oritz Cofer, The Changeling
Terrance Hayes, Mr. T—
Bob Hicok, O my pa-pa
NEW Victoria Redel, Bedecked
Stacey Waite, The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV
Saeed Jones, Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown
13. Situation and Setting: What Happens? Where? When?
Situation
Rita Dove, Daystar
Denise Duhamel, Humanity 101
Tracy K. Smith, Sci- Fi
Setting
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
NEW Situation, Setting, and Historical and Cultural Contexts
NEW Jericho Brown, Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry
One Poem, Multiple Situations and Settings
Li-Young Lee, Persimmons
NEW Chen Chen, I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party
One Situation and Setting, Multiple Poems
Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Sir Walter Raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
The Occasional Poem
The Carpe Diem Poem
John Donne, The Flea
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
The Aubade
John Donne, The Sun Rising
Poems for Further Study
NEW Carmen Giménez Smith, Our Voices Occupy Rooms
Terrance Hayes, Carp Poem
Natasha Trethewey, Pilgrimage
Mahmound Darwish, Identity Card
Yehuda Amichai, On Yom Kippur in 1967 . . .
Homelands: An Album
Maya Angelou, Africa
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Maya Angelou
Derek Walcott, A Far Cry from Africa
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Derek Walcott
Claude McKay, The Tropics in New York
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica
Martín Espada, Coca-Cola and Coco Frío
Cathy Song, Heaven
Adrienne Su, Escape from the Old Country
14. Theme and Tone
Tone
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Freeway
Theme
NEW José Olivarez, Down to My Elbows
Theme and Conflict
Adrienne Rich, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Su, On Writing
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Adrienne Su
Poems for Further Study
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Mouse’s Petition
Robert Burns, To a Mouse
Frank O'Hara, Poem
NEW Rick Barot, The Lovers
SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on “The Mouse’s Petition”
Family: An Album
Simon J. Ortiz, My Father’s Song
Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
NEW José Antonio Rodríguez, Tender
NEW José Olivarez, Regret or My Dad Says Love
Ellen Bryant Voigt, My Mother
Emily Grosholz, Eden
Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Philip Larkin
Jimmy Santiago Baca, Green Chile
Paul Martínez Pompa, The Abuelita Poem
Andrew Hudgins, Begotten
15. Language: Word Choice and Order
Precision and Ambiguity
Sarah Cleghorn, The golf links lie so near the mill
Li-Young Lee, Leaving
NEW Greg Williamson, Internet
Denotation and Connotation
Walter De La Mare, Slim Cunning Hands
Word Order and Placement
Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz
NEW Tiana Clark, My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work
Poems for Further Study
William Blake, London
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow; This Is Just to Say
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: William Carlos Williams
Sharon Olds, Sex without Love
Kay Ryan, Blandeur
Martha Collins, The Irish were not, the Germans
Richard Blanco, My Father in English
NEW Amanda Gorman, Alarum
16. Visual Imagery and Figures of Speech
Claude McKay, The Harlem Dancer
Ada Limón, Dandelion Insomnia
Simile and Analogy
Todd Boss, My Love for You Is So Embarrassingly
Metaphor
William Shakespeare, That time of year thou mayst in me behold
NEW Jimmy Santiago Baca, Immigrants in Our Own Land
Personification
Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death—
Metonymy and Synecdoche
William Wordsworth, London, 1802
Tracy K. Smith, Ash
Emma Bolden, House Is an Enigma
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Tracy K. Smith
Allusion
Poems for Further Study
William Shakespeare, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
John Donne, Batter my heart, three-personed God
NEW Sylvia Plath, Metaphors
NEW Louise Erdich, Birth
Liz Berry, The Republic of Motherhood
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Liz Berry
NEW Carmen Giménez Smith, Beasts
Natalie Diaz, When the Beloved Asks, “What Would You Do If You Woke Up and I Was a Shark?”
17. Symbol
The Invented Symbol
James Dickey, The Leap
The Traditional Symbol
Edmund Waller, Song
Dorothy Parker, One Perfect Rose
The Symbolic Poem
William Blake, The Sick Rose
Poems for Further Study
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sympathy
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Howard Nemerov, The Vacuum
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Ada Limón, The Leash
18. The Sounds of Poetry
Rhyme
Other Sound Devices
Sound Poems
Helen Chasin, The Word Plum
Alexander Pope, Sound and Sense
Poetic Meter
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Metrical Feet
Anonymous, There was a young girl from St. Paul
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from The Charge of the Light Brigade
Jane Taylor, The Star
Phillis Wheatley, An Hymn to the Evening
Jessie Pope, The Call
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Poems for Further Study
William Shakespeare, Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight
Walt Whitman, A Noiseless Patient Spider
W. B. Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: W. B. Yeats
Rita Dove, Pedestrian Crossing, Charlottesville
Words and Music: An Album
Thomas Campion, When to her lute Corinna sings
Anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens
Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham
Augustus Montague Toplady, A Prayer, Living and Dying
Robert Hayden, Homage to the Empress of the Blues
Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’
Mod Def, Hip Hop
19. Internal Structure
Dividing Poems into “Parts”
Pat Mora, Sonrisas
Internal versus External or Formal “Parts”
Galway Kinnell, Blackberry Eating
Lyrics as Internal Dramas
Seamus Heaney, Punishment
Sharon Olds, The Victims
Making Arguments about Structure
Poems without “Parts”
Walt Whitman, I Hear America Singing
Poems for Further Study
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
Philip Larkin, Church Going
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Philip Larkin
José Antonio Rodríguez, Shelter
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay in Progress on “Church Going”
20. External Form
Stanzas
Traditional or Fixed Stanza Forms
Robert Frost, Acquainted with the Night
Traditional Verse Forms
Fixed Forms or Form-Based Subgenres
Traditional Forms: Poems for Further Study
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Natasha Trethewey, Myth
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina
A. E. Stallings, Sestina: Like
Natalie Diaz, Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation
Evie Shockley, acrobatic
The Way a Poem Looks
E. E. Cummings, 1(a; in Just
Concrete Poetry
George Herbert, Easter Wings
Robert Herrick, The Pillar of Fame
Justin Phillip Reed, Portrait with Stiff Upper Lip
The Sonnet: An Album
Henry Contable, My lady’s presence makes the roses red
William Shakespeare, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent
Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, O rose divine, in gentle cultivation
William Wordsworth, Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; The world is too much with us
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
Christina Rozzetti, In an Artist’s Studio
Edna St. Vincent Millay, What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why; Women have loved before as I love now; I, being born a woman and distressed
Gwendolyn Brooks, First Fight. Then Fiddle.
June Jordan, Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Miracle Wheatley
Billy Collins, Sonnet
NEW Martín Espada, Love Is a Luminous Insect at the Window
NEW Diane Seuss, The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Diane Seuss
NEW Mary Jo Salter, from Zoom Rooms
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Mary Jo Salter
Haiku: An Album
Traditional Japanese Haiku
Chiyojo, Whether astringent
Bashō, A village without bells—; This road—
Modern Haiku
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
Allen Ginsberg, Looking over my shoulder
Richard Wright, In the falling snow
Etheridge Knight, Eastern guard tower; The falling snow flakes; Making jazz swing in
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Etheridge Knight
Octavio Paz, Basho An
Sanchez, from 9 Haiku (for Freedom’s Sisters)
Twaiku
The Golden Shovel: An Album
NEW Abel Merropol, Bitter Fruit
NEW Evie Shockley, you can say that again, billie
Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Gwendolyn Brooks
Terrance Hayes, The Golden Shovel
Gwendolyn Brooks, a song in the front yard
Evie Shockley, song in the back yard
Gwendolyn Brooks, Riot
Liz Lochhead, Beyond It
Gwendolyn Brooks, Behind the Scenes
Julia Alvarez, Behind the Scenes
EXPLORING CONTEXTS
21. The Author's Work as Context: Adrienne Rich
The Poetry of Adrienne Rich
Poems by Adrienne Rich
At a Bach Concert
Storm Warnings
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Adrienne Rich
Planetarium
For the Record
My mouth hovers across your breasts
History
Transparencies
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
Passages from Rich’s Essays
From When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision
From A Communal Poetry
From Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts
From Poetry and the Forgotten Future
SAMPLE WRITING: Comparative Essay on Sonnets by Shakespeare and Millay
Emily Dickinson: An Album
Poems by Emily Dickinson
Wild Nights—Wilds Nights!
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
I stepped from Plank to Plank
Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Pat Mora: An Album
Poems by Pat Mora
Elena
Gentle Communion
Mothers and Daughters
La Migra
Ode to Adobe
NEW Martín Espada: An Album
Poems by Martín Espada
NEW Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper
NEW The Sign in My Father’s Hands
Of the Threads That Connect the Stars
NEW Floaters
22. Cultural and Historical Contexts: The Harlem Renaissance
Poems of the Harlem Renaissance
Arna Bontemps, A Black Man Talks of Reaping
Countee Cullen, Yet Do I Marvel; Incident; Saturday’s Child
Angelina Girmiké, The Black Finger; Tenebris
Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues; The Negro Speaks of Rivers; I, Too; Harlem
Helene Johnson, Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem
Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows; If We Must Die; America; The White House
Contextual Excerpts
James Weldon Johnson, from the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry
Alain Locke, from The New Negro
Rudolph Fisher, from The Caucasian Storms Harlem
W. E. B. Du Bois, from Two Novels
Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Langston Hughes, from The Big Sea
SAMPLE WRITING: Research Essay on “I, Too”
#BlackLivesMatter: An Album
Danez Smith, not an elegy for Mike Brown
Ross Gay, A Small Needful Fact
NEW Martín Espada, How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way
Patricia Smith, Sagas of the Accidental Saint
Danez Smith, dear white america
Evie Shockley, of speech
Tracy K. Smith, Unrest in Baton Rouge
Kevin Young, Not Guilty [A Frieze for Sandra Bland]
Reginald Dwayne Betts, When I Think of Tamir Rice While; Driving; Parking Lot, Too
Claudia Rankine, Weather; from The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning
Tracy K. Smith, Dear Black America: A Letter
23. Critical Contexts: Phillis Wheatly and Richard Blanco
Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America
Critical Excerpts: Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
NEW Angelene Jamison, from Analysis of Selected Poetry of Phillis Wheatley
NEW Terence Collins, from Phillis Wheatley: The Dark Side of Her Poetry
NEW June Jordan, from The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley
NEW James A. Levernier, from Style as Protest in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley
NEW Mary McAleer Balkun, from Phillis Wheatley’s Construction of Otherness and the Rhetoric of Performed Ideology
Richard Blanco, One Today
Critical Excerpts: Richard Blanco’s “One Today”
NEW David Freedlander, from Richard Blanco, Obama’s Historic Inauguration Poet
NEW Randy Malamud, from The Hazards of Inaugural Poetry
NEW Carol Rumens, from Richard Blanco’s Inaugural Poem for Obama is a Valiant Flop
NEW David Biespiel, from David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Poet and a President
NEW Craig Santos Perez, from Lip- syncing the Poetry of Empire
READING MORE POETRY
W. H. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats
William Blake, The Lamb; The Tyger
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
John Donne, Death, be not proud; The Good-Morrow; A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask
Robert Frost, “Out, Out—”; Fire and Ice; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Joy Harjo, The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window
Seamus Heaney, Digging
Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur; Spring and Fall
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn; To Autumn
Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Yusef Komunyakaa
Tu Do Street
Linda Pastan, To a Daughter Leaving Home
Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll
Sylvia Path, Daddy
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market
Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
NEW Phillis Wheatley, To the University of Cambridge, in New-England
Walt Whitman, Facing West from California’s Shores
Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
Biographical Sketches: Poets
PART THREE: DRAMA
24. Drama: Reading, Responding, Writing
Reading Drama
Thinking Theatrically
Susan Glaspell, Trifles
Responding to Drama
SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation of Trifles
SAMPLE WRITING: Reading Notes on Trifles
Writing about Drama
SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on Trifles
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on Trifles
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
25. Elements of Drama
Character
Plot and Structure
Stages, Sets, and Setting
Tone, Language, and Symbol
Theme
August Wilson, Fences
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: August Wilson
Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Quiara Alegría Hudes
EXPLORING CONTEXTS
26. The Author's Work as Context: William Shakespeare
The Life of Shakespeare: A Biographical Mystery
Exploring Shakespeare’s Work: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
27. Cultural and Historical Contexts: Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
The Historical Significance of A Raisin in the Sun
The Great Migration
Life in the “Black Metropolis”
Housing and Residential Segregation
The Civil Rights Movement
African Americans and Africa
The “Americanness” of A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Lorraine Hansberry
Contextual Excerpts
Richard Wright, from Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk; History of the Negro in the United States
Robert Gruenberg, from Chicago Fiddles While Trumbull Park Burns
Gertrude Samuels, from Even More Crucial Than in the South
Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, from New Southerner: The Middle-Class Negro
Martin Luther King Jr., from Letter from Birmingham Jail
Robert C. Weaver, from The Negro as an American
Earl E. Thorpe, from Africa in the Thought of Negro Americans
Phaon Goldman, from The Significance of African Freedom for the Negro American
Bruce Norris, from Clybourne Park
28. Critical Contexts: Sophocles's Antigone
NEW TRANSLATION Sophocles, Antigone
Critical Excerpts
Richard C. Jebb, from the introduction to The Antigone of Sophocles
Maurice Bowra, from Sophoclean Tragedy
Bernard Knox, from the introduction to Antigone
Martha C. Nussbaum, from Sophocles’ Antigone: Conflict, Vision, and Simplification
Phillip Holt, from Polis and Tragedy in the Antigone
Helen Morales, from Antigone Rising
SAMPLE WRITING: Research Essay on Antigone
READING MORE DRAMA
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House
Lynn Nottage, Sweat
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Lynn Nottage
NEW TRANSLATION Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
PART FOUR: WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE
WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE
29. Basic Moves: Paraphrase, Summary, Description
30. The Literature Essay
31. The Writing Process
32. The Literature Research Essay
33. Quotation, Citation, and Documentation
34. Writing with Generative AI
35. Sample Research Essay
Critical Approaches
Emphasis on the Text
Emphasis on the Source
Emphasis on the Receiver
Historical and Ideological Criticism
Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgments
Index of Authors
Index of Titles and First Lines
Glossary/Index of Literary Terms
The Norton Introduction
to Literature, Portable
Preface for Instructors
New to the Portable Fifteenth Edition
New and Expanded Resources for Students and Instructors
Hallmark Features of The Norton Introduction to Literature
Acknowledgements
Introduction
What Is Literature?
What Does Literature Do?
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
What Are the Genres of Literature?
Why Read Literature?
Why Study Literature?
Hai-Dang Phan, My Father’s “Norton Introduction to Literature,” Third Edition (1981)
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Hai- Dang Phan
John Crowe Ransom, Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
PART ONE: FICTION
1. Fiction: Reading, Responding, Writing
Telling Stories: Interpretation
Anonymous, The Elephant in the Village of the Blind
Reading and Responding to Fiction
Linda Brewer, 20/20
SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation and Notes on “20/20”
Reading and Responding to Graphic Fiction
Jules Feiffer, Superman
Key Concepts
Writing about Fiction
Isabel Allende, And of Clay Are We Created
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Isabel Allende
SAMPLE WRITING: Reading Notes on “And of Clay Are We Created”
SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on “And of Clay Are We Created”
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on “And of Clay Are We Created”
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
2. Plot
Plot versus Action, Sequence, and Subplot
Pace
Conflicts
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Shroud
The Five Parts of Plot
Common Plot Types
Ralph Ellison, King of the Bingo Game
Chimamanda Ngozi Adchie, Apollo
3. Narration and Point of View
Types of Narration
Tense
Narrator versus Implied Author
Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat
George Saunders, Puppy
Jamil Jan Kochai, Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
4. Character
Heroes and Villains versus Protagonists and Antagonists
Major versus Minor Characters
Flat versus Round and Static versus Dynamic Characters
Stock Characters and Archetypes
Reading Character in Fiction and Life
NEW Toni Morrison, Sweetness
David Foster Wallace, Good People
Junot Díaz, Wildwood
5. Setting
Temporal and Physical, General and Particular Setting
Functions of Setting
Vague and Vivid Settings
Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities
Traditional Expectations of Time and Place
James Joyce, Araby
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Volar
Zadie Smith, Meet the President!
6. Symbolism and Figurative Language
Literary Symbolism
Figures of Speech and Sound Devices
Interpreting Symbolism and Figurative Language
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birth-Mark
A. S. Byatt, The Thing in the Forest
Edwidge Danticat, A Wall of Fire Rising
SAMPLE WRITING: Comparative Essay on “The Birth-Mark” and “The Thing in the Forest”
7. Theme
Aesop, The Two Crabs
Theme(s): Singular or Plural?
Be Specific: Theme as Idea versus Topic or Subject
Don’t Be Too Specific: Theme as General Idea
Theme versus Moral
Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children
Sandra Cisneros, Mericans
NEW Ted Chiang, The Great Silence
8. Comparing) The Whole Text: Louise Erdrich
Love Medicine
The Years of My Birth
READING MORE FICTION
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson
Authors on Their Work: Toni Cade Bambara
Ray Bradbury, The Veldt
Raymond Carver, Cathedral
Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants
Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artis
Jamaica Kincaid, Girl
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Alice Munro, Boys and Girls
Haruki Murakami, Barn Burning
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
David Sedaris, Jesus Shaves
Amy Tan, A Pair of Tickets
Eudora Welty, Why I Live at the P.O.
PART TWO: POETRY
9. Poetry" Reading, Responding, Writing
Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus
Defining Poetry
Lydia Davis, Head, Heart
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Billy Collins
The Prose Poem
Campbell McGrath, My Library
Ada Limón, Sacred Objects
Poetic Subgenres and Kinds
Eavan Boland, Quarantine
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Eavan Boland
Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid
William Wordsworth, I wandered lonely as a cloud
Elisa Gonzalez, In Quarantine, I Reflect on the Death of Ophelia
Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America
Emily Dickinson, The Sky is low—the Clouds are mean
Billy Collins, Divorce
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
Robert Hayden, A Letter from Phillis Wheatley
Responding to Poetry
Writing about Poetry
Aphra Behn, On Her Loving Two Equally
SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on “On Her Loving Two Equally”
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on “On Her Loving Two Equally”
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
10. Speaker: Whose Voice Do We Hear?
Narrative Poems and Their Speakers
Etheridge Knight, Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
Speakers in the Dramatic Monologue
A. E. Stallings, Hades Welcomes His Bride
The Lyric and Its Speaker
NEW Louise Erdich, Indian Boarding School: The Runaways
William Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Poems for Further Study
Walt Whitman, I celebrate myself, and sing myself
Philip Schultz, Googling Ourselves
Lucille Clifton, cream of wheat
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway
NEW Dylan Seuss-Brakeman, Freelance artist. That’s what you say . . .
NEW Jerico Brown, As a Human Being
Elizabeth Bishop, Exchanging Hats
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Changeling
11. Situation and Setting: What Happens? Where? When?
Situation
Rita Dove, Daystar
Denise Duhamel, Humanity 101
Tracy K. Smith, Sci- Fi
Setting
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
NEW Jericho Brown, Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry
One Poem, Multiple Situations and Settings
Li-Young Lee, Persimmons
NEW Chen Chen, I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party
One Situation and Setting, Multiple Poems
Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Sir Walter Raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
The Occasional Poem
The Carpe Diem Poem
John Donne, The Flea
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
Poems for Further Study
NEW Carmen Giménez Smith, Our Voices Occupy Rooms
Terrance Hayes, Carp Poem
Natasha Trethewey, Pilgrimage
Cathy Song, Heaven
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica
Martín Espada, Coca-Cola and Coco Frío
12. Theme and Tone
Tone
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Freeway
Theme
NEW José Olivarez, Down to My Elbows
Adrienne Rich, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Adrienne Rich
Theme and Conflict
Adrienne Su, On Writing
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Adrienne Su
Poems for Further Study
Martín Espada, Of the Threads That Connect the Stars
Danez Smith, not an elegy for Mike Brown dear white america
Jimmy Santiago Baca, Green Chile
Paul Martínez Pompa, The Abuelita Poem
13. Language: Word Choice and Order
Precision and Ambiguity
Sarah Cleghorn, The golf links lie so near the mill
Li-Young Lee, Leaving
NEW Greg Williamson, Internet
Denotation and Connotation
Walter De La Mare, Slim Cunning Hands
Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz
Word Order and Placement
NEW Tiana Clark, My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work
Poems for Further Study
William Blake, London
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow; This Is Just to Say
Sharon Olds, Sex without Love
Kay Ryan, Blandeur
Richard Blanco, My Father in English
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Parking Lot, Too
14. Visual Imagery and Figures of Speech
Claude McKay, The Harlem Dancer
Ada Limón, Dandelion Insomnia
Simile and Analogy
Todd Boss, My Love for You Is So Embarrassingly
Metaphor
William Shakespeare, That time of year thou mayst in me behold
NEW Jimmy Santiago Baca, Immigrants in Our Own Land
Personification
Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death—
Metonymy and Synecdoche
William Wordsworth, London, 1802
Tracy K. Smith, Ash
Emma Bolden, House Is an Enigma
Allusion
Poems for Further Study
William Shakespeare, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
John Donne, Batter my heart, three-personed God
NEW Sylvia Plath, Metaphors
NEW Louise Erdich, Birth
Liz Berry, The Republic of Motherhood
NEW Carmen Giménez Smith, Beasts
NEW José Antonio Rodríguez, Tender
15. Symbol
The Invented Symbol
James Dickey, The Leap
The Traditional Symbol
Edmund Waller, Song
Dorothy Parker, One Perfect Rose
The Symbolic Poem
William Blake, The Sick Rose
Poems for Further Study
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sympathy
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Howard Nemerov, The Vacuum
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Ada Limón, The Leash
16. The Sounds of Poetry
Rhyme
Other Sound Devices
Sound Poems
Helen Chasin, The Word Plum
Alexander Pope, Sound and Sense
Poetic Meter
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Metrical Feet
Anonymous, There was a young girl from St. Paul
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from The Charge of the Light Brigade
Jane Taylor, The Star
Phillis Wheatley, An Hymn to the Evening
Poems for Further Study
William Shakespeare, Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight
Walt Whitman, A Noiseless Patient Spider
W. B. Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Rita Dove, Pedestrian Crossing, Charlottesville
17. Internal Structure
Dividing Poems into “Parts”
Pat Mora, Sonrisas
Internal versus External or Formal “Parts”
Galway Kinnell, Blackberry Eating
Lyrics as Internal Dramas
Seamus Heaney, Punishment
Sharon Olds, The Victims
Making Arguments about Structure
Poems without “Parts”
Walt Whitman, I Hear America Singing
Poems for Further Study
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
Philip Larkin, Church Going
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Philip Larkin
Terrance Hayes, Mr. T—
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay in Progress on “Church Going”
18. External Form
Stanzas
Traditional or Fixed Stanza Forms
Robert Frost, Acquainted with the Night
Traditional Verse Forms
Fixed Forms or Form-Based Subgenres
Traditional Forms: Poems for Further Study
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Natasha Trethewey, Myth
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina
A. E. Stallings, Sestina: Like
Natalie Diaz, Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation
Evie Shockley, acrobatic
The Way a Poem Looks
E. E. Cummings, 1(a; in Just
Concrete Poetry
George Herbert, Easter Wings
Henry Contable, My lady’s presence makes the roses red
William Shakespeare, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent
William Wordsworth, Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; The world is too much with us
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
Christina Rozzetti, In an Artist’s Studio
Claude McKay, America; The White House
Edna St. Vincent Millay, What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why; Women have loved before as I love now; I, being born a woman and distressed
Gwendolyn Brooks, First Fight. Then Fiddle.
Billy Collins, Sonnet
NEW Martín Espada, Love Is a Luminous Insect at the Window
NEW Mary Jo Salter, from Zoom Rooms
SAMPLE WRITING: Comparative Essay on Sonnets by Shakespeare and Millay
The Golden Shovel: An Album
NEW Abel Merropol, Bitter Fruit
NEW Evie Shockley, you can say that again, billie
Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Gwendolyn Brooks
Terrance Hayes, The Golden Shovel
Gwendolyn Brooks, a song in the front yard
Evie Shockley, song in the back yard
Gwendolyn Brooks, Riot
Liz Lochhead, Beyond It
Gwendolyn Brooks, Behind the Scenes
Julia Alvarez, Behind the Scenes
READING MORE POETRY
Julia Alvarez, “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen”
Anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens
W. H. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats
Bashō, A village without bells—; This road—
William Blake, The Lamb; The Tyger
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry
Countee Cullen, Yet Do I Marvel
Emily Dickinson, “Hope” is the thing with feathers—; I heard a fly buzz—when I died—; My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun—; I stepped from Plank to Plank; Tell all the truth but tell it slant—; Wild Nights!—Wild Nights!
John Donne, Death, be not proud
Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask
Robert Frost, Fire and Ice; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; “Out, Out—”
Joy Harjo, The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window
Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Seamus Heaney, Digging
Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur; Spring and Fall
Langston Hughes, Harlem; I, Too
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn; To Autumn
Etheridge Knight, Eastern guard tower; The falling snow flakes; Making jazz swing in
Pat Mora, Elena; Gentle Communion
Simon J. Ortiz, My Father’s Song
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Linda Pastan, To a Daughter Leaving Home
Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham
Adrienne Rich, At a Bach Concert; History
Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
Derek Walcott, A Far Cry from Africa
Walt Whitman, Facing West from California’s Shores
Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
W. B. Yeats, Leda and the Swan; Biographical Sketches: Poets
PART THREE: DRAMA
19. Drama: Reading, Responding, Writing
Reading Drama
Thinking Theatrically
Susan Glaspell, Trifles
Responding to Drama
SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation of Trifles
SAMPLE WRITING: Reading Notes on Trifles
Writing about Drama
SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on Trifles
SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on Trifles
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
20. Elements of Drama
Character
Plot and Structure
Stages, Sets, and Setting
Tone, Language, and Symbol
Theme
August Wilson, Fences
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: August Wilson
Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful
NEW AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Quiara Alegría Hudes
READING MORE DRAMA
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House
William Shakespere, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
NEW TRANSLATION Sophocles, Antigone
PART FOUR: WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE
WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE
21. Basic Moves: Paraphrase, Summary, Description
22. The Literature Essay
23. The Writing Process
24. The Literature Research Essay
25. Quotation, Citation, and Documentation
26. Writing with Generative AI
27. Sample Research Essay
Critical Approaches
Emphasis on the Text
Emphasis on the Source
Emphasis on the Receiver
Historical and Ideological Criticism
Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgments
Index of Authors
Index of Titles and First Lines
Glossary/Index of Literary Terms
Copyright © W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2024