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
Shesgreen’s disclosure of Norton’s internal communiqués may have caused some embarrassment, but most people are not shocked to learn of their interest in scooping their competitor. Anthologies, like most publishing ventures, are undertaken to make money.
Neither Norton nor Longman was willing to discuss exact sales figures, but Shesgreen and others agree that the Norton remains far and away the industry leader. Nonetheless, Shesgreen writes in a footnote that the Norton’s “sales figures began to decline toward the end of the sixth and more rapidly in the seventh edition.” The Norton is now in its eighth edition. Shesgreen’s discoveries, coupled with the swift and outraged response from Norton, suggest a company clinging to market share amidst rising competition and a rapidly changing marketplace.
Yet critics of Shesgreen’s article claim he fails to examine why anthology sales spiked in the first place, and why they might be in decline today.
Jeffrey Williams, professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an editor of the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, dismisses Shesgreen’s article as a “half-assed exposé.” Williams, an expert on academic culture and a longtime analyst of the changing literary canon, suggests that Shesgreen is more interested in salacious gossip than scholarship.
Central to the scholarship of literary anthologies, Williams says, is a study of the modern American university and the drastic changes it underwent in the middle of the twentieth century. “College attendance exploded after World War II,” Williams says. “Between 1960 and 1970 alone, the number of students went from four to eight million.”
Many of these new students were the first among their families to go to college, coming from public schools rather than private preparatory schools, which had long been the primary college feeders. The divergent backgrounds of the new students meant that English departments needed to get everyone on the same page quickly. The easiest way to do this was with a comprehensive survey course. And survey courses needed textbooks.
In 1962, M. H. Abrams was the right man at the right time. In an interview in the Minnesota Review from 2007, Abrams told Williams, its editor, that the Norton made survey classes affordable for students because they allowed students to get hundreds of authors in just one book.
Williams adds that changes in literature curriculums made the comprehensive literary anthology a perfect tool for teachers and students. Just as the students of English literature were changing, so, too, was the curriculum. New Criticism was coming into vogue, placing a greater focus on close readings of poetry and fiction, and less on purely historical study in the classic languages of Greek, Latin, and Middle English. Students armed only with English could now be literary scholars, poring over the meticulously edited texts in their trusty Norton.
If Abrams and the Norton came along at the right time, that time may be passing. Not because of “corporate greed,” as Shesgreen argues, but because of developments in the academy. Fewer colleges are requiring survey courses for undergraduates, giving rise to greater undergraduate specialization. Students are designing their own courses of study, and, perhaps not surprisingly, are more interested in modern, non-canonical literature than in the musty old white Englishmen of antiquity.
Another factor, according to Williams, is the proliferation of inexpensive texts online. Since most pre-1900 literature exists free in the public domain, many students opt to forego paying for a bulky anthology despite its professionally annotated texts or the up-to-date translations.
“I can’t imagine a modern student carrying the Norton around,” Williams says. “But you could probably whack someone with it or drop it on somebody’s foot.”
As the market for traditional anthologies contracts, the differences between them do as well, not only because of competition, but because of their necessary responsiveness to consumers. Both Norton and Longman are fighting for the same narrow market and spend a lot of time finding out what that market wants.
During the “canon wars” of the eighties and early nineties, much ado was made about how authorities determine what students read, who is studied, and who is ignored. As the giant in the room, Norton’s failure to include women or post-colonial writers, it was argued, denied writers not just a place in a book, but in an entire field of study.
As Barbara Benedict observed in Making the Modern Reader, her 1996 study of early modern literary anthologies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anthologies “mold both the reader’s subjectivity—his or her imaginary interaction with the text—and the literary values that lead to a canon.” Anthologies teach students both how and what to read.
But the market is never far behind. Competition for readers may have made anthologies less the arbiter of the literary canon than mere reflections of current trends in the classroom. Several economic incentives shape the editing and marketing of current anthologies.
Both the Norton and the Longman are edited from scholars from a variety of universities, from Harvard to Indiana Univeristy. This range, according to Damrosch, consciously reflects the diversity of the anthologies’ potential consumers, students at both public and private colleges.
Shesgreen breaks down the basic economics, using Northern Illinois University as an example:
“We have 23,000 students at NIU, including 600 English majors,” he says. “If we require every student to buy the Norton, that’s a lot more subscriptions than if a place like Stanford places an order. So they want to include enough state schools without, shall we say, debasing the masthead.”
Additionally, both Norton and Longman pride themselves on market research. According to Jeff Williams, Norton is one of the few publishers that still uses “travelers,” salespeople who visit schools to interview professors and students when preparing a new edition. Damrosch says that Longman sends out hundreds of surveys to professors, to better serve current curricula. Customer feedback has led to the same changes in both publishers’ anthologies: more post-colonial writers, less Spencer, more Milton, and the inclusion of the complete text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Giving the customer what he or she wants makes perfect business sense. But is it bad for the study of British literature? Sean Shesgreen thinks so.
“A lot of people think that the profession would benefit from anthologies that offered greater choice,” Shesgreen says. “Right now, they are becoming more generic and less controversial.”
Recognizing the limits of the current anthology, Damrosch suggests that anthologies in the future may be customized on a class-to-class basis. To satisfy the syllabi of so many instructors, printed anthologies must contain more texts than any single user could possibly desire. Damrosch envisions the future anthology offering a more streamlined selection of texts, tailored to a specific professor’s course, and delivered to students as an e-book—basically a digital version of the photocopied course pack.
Such variation would make the anthologizing of authors less rigid and more democratic, or as Barbara Benedict says of older hand-made anthologies, it would “further decentralize literary culture.” Publishers like Longman and Norton could devote energy to annotating a wider variety of texts, expanding the canon rather than contracting it.
But what might be lost if each student was handed a neatly tailored anthology at the beginning of class? Perhaps the preface to the eighth edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature says it best: “One of the joys of literature in English is its spectacular abundance.” Comprehensive anthologies will always contain more than is necessary for a single class and likely more than an individual will want to read. Yet a full collection almost ensures the happy accidents of discovery that make reading such an enchanting exercise. In a culture increasingly “made to order” there is something deeply romantic in the idea of the student, plagued by the insomnia of the active mind, encountering the “spectacular abundance” late at night under a single lamp. ♦