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.
“On its way to you is the table of contents for the Longman Anthology along with sample materials from the Romantic section, handed off in a brown bag to our east coast sales manager in a parking lot somewhere outside of Miami,” she wrote in 1998. “I’m kidding, but not by much.”
A debonair 007 plying the enemy with cocktails. Informants meeting publishing executives in parking lots. Predictably, Norton’s response to these allegations has been swift.
“Professor Shesgreen’s article is sloppy and riddled with too many errors to address or correct,” Louise Brockett, director of publicity at Norton, said on behalf of President and CEO Drake McFeely.
Critical Inquiry stands behind Shesgreen’s article, according to Managing Editor James Williams. Williams notes that the essay has generated an unusually high number of responses, both positive and negative. The journal will publish responses from Abrams, Greenblatt, Damrosch, McFeely, among others, in its summer issue. Shesgreen will offer a brief response titled “Anthologies and Sausages.” Williams said that most of the responses are constructive and contribute to an ongoing debate, though he regrets that Norton’s McFeely does not elaborate on the errors he mentions.
Typical of his personality, Shesgreen is tickled by the minor storm he has caused. He blithely refers to himself as “a man of no importance” who has dared take on the academic giants associated with the anthology. Yet he is clearly delighted with the attention he is receiving.
“People are looking at me as some guy from a third-tier institution out in the cornfields,” he says. “The implication is that the Norton editors are giants of letters and Shesgreen is a midget.”
Although the Norton and Longman are preeminent rivals in the anthology world, their editors are now colleagues at Harvard, with offices just a building away from each other: David Damrosch’s in the Dean Palmer House and Stephen Greenblatt’s next door in the Barker Center.
When Damrosch—recently named professor of comparative literature at Harvard after a long stint at Columbia Univeristy—was approached in the mid-nineties about editing a major British literature anthology, the first thing he did was look at the Norton.
“I wanted to see if there was anything fresh to do,” he remembers. “Right on the inside cover, I noticed they had left Ireland completely off their literary map of England, even though they had included Irish authors. On the other hand, Wales was on the map but they had included no Welsh literature.”
Soon he noticed other areas where, he felt, the Norton was lacking. Damrosch says the Norton had fallen more than ten years behind in the field: it included too few female authors and failed to provide sufficient historic context for its texts.
Perhaps most damning was the reaction of Damrosch’s niece, who had recently completed a college survey course using the Norton.
“She said the book was pretty boring,” he says. “If that’s the reaction to using an anthology, then something is wrong.”
Damrosch concluded that Norton’s decision to present literature with limited historical context was what it had made it dull for students like his niece. He realized that despite the shared language, most American students lacked an understanding of British history and culture.
“The Norton, at the time we started work on the Longman, was a product of New Criticism,” he says. “It viewed poetry and other literary works as aesthetic artifacts to be read on their own. We wanted to surround the work with context and perspective.”
When Norton executives finally got a look at the Longman table of contents, they noticed several innovations. Longman included full-page color illustrations, more writing by women, more post-colonial material, and new groupings of texts into “perspectives” and “responses” sections, which showed different authors in conversation with one another.
Moreover, the Longman expanded the definition of literature in its introduction, defining it as “artistically shaped works written in a charged language, appealing to the imagination at least as much as to discursive reasoning.” In this anthology, a speech by Churchill was as worthy of study as a sonnet by Shakespeare.
Despite all these changes, the two anthologies are strikingly similar today, as they were at Longman’s release in 1999. Shesgreen provides scores of reviews from the time that note how closely the seventh edition of the Norton resembles the first edition of the Longman. One critic observed that roughly four-fifths of the selections were identical. The Norton featured color illustrations, along with bulked up coverage of women and modern literature. Even Ireland had made it onto the map. Through two more volumes from Longman, and one from Norton, the similarities have only grown.
Damrosch downplays Shesgreen’s emphasis on Cold War intrigue between the two anthologies. Yet he says he suspects Norton’s harsh response to Shesgreen’s article reflects embarrassment at the release of internal communications that put profit before academic ideology. He still maintains, for example, that the Norton’s inclusion of female authors has been superficial.
“They just plugged in a few women, not through fresh thinking, but simply by lowering their standards,” Damrosch says. “They disparage mystic women writers and instead throw in some very minor Romantic women poets without shaking up the idea of Romanticism as dominated by six men.”
In his attack on Shesgreen quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Drake McFeely makes the status of the anthology clear: “This would be a minor annoyance if not for the fact that it concerns our most important publication.”