The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Canon Fodder
Sean Shesgreen fires a shot at the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
By Ian Crouch
Sean Shesgreen’s Introduction to Literary Theory class begins with a thud. Students sit up straighter, at attention. The short, compact Irishman drops the Norton Anthology of English Literature—all four pounds of it—onto a desk. “Here is the canon,” he exclaims, grinning back at the startled faces.
Since the publication of its first edition in 1962, the Norton has set the reading lists for British Literature courses throughout the world—its impossibly thin pages introducing Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth to generation after generation of college students. The condensed version comes in at just under three thousand pages. But this venerable institution, which has sold roughly nine million copies over eight editions and accounts for more than a third of the publisher’s total revenue, has made a little enemy in the cornfields of Illinois.
Shesgreen, distinguished research professor of English at Northern Illinois University, puts high stakes money and intrigue front and center in his essay “Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of the Norton Anthology of English Literature,” published in the Winter 2009 issue of the journal Critical Inquiry. He presents documents that depict the competition between the Norton and the upstart Longman Anthology of British Literature—first published in 1999 and now in its third edition—as an ivory-tower death-match, with Norton going to any lengths to remain on top of the academic textbook heap.
The essay has sparked outraged responses from the Norton’s defenders who call Shesgreen unqualified and his work a hatchet job. But Shesgreen, a specialist in 18th century British literature and longtime admirer of the Norton, did not start out to cause a stir.
Shesgreen, whose cropped goatee frames a mischievous smile, characterizes his academic life as the study of “marginal people and outcasts.” Aptly, his most recent book, Images of the Outcast, examines how London’s urban poor have been portrayed in various visual arts. Shesgreen has found himself an outcast several times in his own life. He entered a monastery as a young man in Ireland, which soon sent him abroad to the United States. He arrived in America amid the social upheaval of the sixties and quickly realized the monk’s life was not for him. He fled to pursue a Ph.D. in English at Northwestern. He was an exile from his home country and now from his religion as well.
Soon, he alienated himself again, this time from one of literature’s most powerful organizations. In 1969, Shesgreen and several colleagues interrupted a Modern Language Association conference in New York to protest the organization’s apolitical stance on the Vietnam War. The protests temporarily closed down the conference, and Shesgreen was arrested along with two confederates.
“I spent the night in the Tombs of New York,” he recalls, laughing. “As a result of our protest the hotel was shut down, and I think it did move the MLA to become more politically active.”
Despite his agitator past, Shesgreen says he intended merely to write a conventional history of the Norton. HHe had long been interested in the list of editors on the Norton’s title page. How were these people chosen? And what effect did they have on the study of British literature? He began collecting every edition, including the first. That list of editors contained no women and was packed with what he calls “white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants exclusively from elite universities.” Shesgreen wanted to know how these original editors influenced the content of later editions: what had changed and what remained the same?
In, 2003, at the encouragement of then Norton general editor M.H. Abrams, Shesgreen traveled to Cornell to examine materials relating to the construction of the original anthology from 1962, including Abrams’ original notes and personal correspondences. What he found did not amount to much.
“He didn’t look at his files before I came out to see if the material I was looking for was there,” Shesgreen says. “When I got there I found exactly three letters covering the beginning of the Norton.” He feared his trip had been a waste of time.
Near the end of his stay, however, Abrams gave Shesgreen a folder that he had just recently found. Shesgreen’s eyes went wide at what he found inside: a series of e-mails from 1998 exchanged between the anthology’s editors and Norton executives in New York. Shesgreen saw an organization obsessed with the threat posed by the new Longman Anthology of British Literature, and used what he terms “cutthroat tactics” in his article to undermine the competition.
As discreetly as he could, he rushed to the photocopier before catching his flight back to Illinois.
“At that point I knew I was onto something,” he remembers. “I had new information about the economics of the Norton.”
Academic publishing normally conjures images of musty libraries and stiff English professors. Shesgreen’s discoveries, on the other hand, seem ripped from the pages of a corporate thriller.
In 1998, the Norton’s new general editor Stephen Greenblatt met with Longman editor David Damrosch at a bar near Columbia University, where Damrosch shared some ideas he had for the upcoming Longman. Greenblatt passed this information to his publisher.
Shesgreen quotes a breathless e-mail to Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, from Norton vice president Julia Reidhead, in which she praises the renowned professor’s “bold infiltration of the opposing camp.”
“I want both to thank you for and to compliment you on that daring conversation,” she writes. “I keep thinking of James Bond suavely lifting a glass with Dr. No.”
Greenblatt’s spy games only left Norton executives wanting more. The Longman was the first competing anthology to be published in years, and according to Shesgreen, Norton was desperate to get a complete copy of the Longman’s table of contents. Later that year, they got it. Shesgreen again quotes an e-mail from Julie Reidhead.