Longman v. Norton

Associated Press Arizona Daily Wildcat A copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature rests in front of rival college text, the Longman Anthology of Britsh Literature, Jan. 8 in Boston. The Norton Anthology, the venerable college textbook used in nearly all collegiate Brit Lit courses for the past 40 years, is being challenged by the Longman Anthology with its inclusion of obscure women writers and literary sidenotes on the political and cultural context of selected pieces of writing.

BOSTON - An upstart is trying to dethrone the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the king of college literary texts.

The Longman Anthology of British Literaature is battling for academic acceptance with an infusion of more female writers, political and cultural commentary accompanying the classics, including snippets of Monty Python.

''Literature should come across as exciting and compelling,'' said David Damrosch, general editor of the anthology and an English professor at Columbia University.

Adding savage reviews and historical context makes literary masterpieces ''more human and less like timeless monuments,'' he said.

Rather than simply presenting poet William Wordsworth's ethereal ''I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud'' by itself, the Longman offers a withering review of another one of his works.

''This will never do...The case of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive is manifestly hopeless; and we give him up as altogether incurable and beyond the power of criticism,'' wrote one critic about Wordsworth's poem ''The Excursion.''

There's also an excerpt from the comedy troupe Monty Python tucked alongside ''Cruise,'' Evelyn Waugh's 1936 satire of British tourists.

But some scholars feel the Longman's approach is too politically correct, sacrificing some fine literature for a trendy cultural payoff. Reducing the amount of Tennyson and Spenser, critics say, is harmful to the field.

The tempest raged at the Modern Language Association's annual meeting in San Francisco last month when several hundred scholars attended a lively debate on the future of literary criticism.

There's much more at stake here than British Literature bragging rights. Nearly 100,000 anthologies at a cost of more than $100 each are purchased each year, with W.W. Norton's flagship book capturing more than 90 percent of the market.

But more than 200 professors converted to the Longman this school year at schools including the University of California, Los Angeles, Baylor University, the University of Arizona, Northeastern University, the University of Michigan, the University of Hawaii and the University of North Carolina.

Despite its new rival's inroads, the Norton's editors aren't surrendering without a fight.

Acknowledging the splash Longman made, Norton editor Julia Reidhead urges critics to wait until the book's seventh edition appears this summer.

''Right now it's comparing an apple to an orange,'' Reidhead said of the current Norton edition, last updated in 1993.

''The next edition is going to give much greater attention to women writers overall,'' she said, listing such names as Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell and Jean Rhys.

The newest Norton will have the full text of Virginia Woolf's ''A Room of One's Own,'' as well as material from former parts of the British empire, such as India, the Caribbean and Africa.

Authors like J.M. Coetzee of South Africa and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe will make appearances, along with in-depth cultural perspectives of medieval Arthurian legends and offbeat 16th-century travel essays.

To top it off, the Norton has another trick up its sleeve: a one-of-a-kind translation of the eighth-century poem ''Beowulf'' by Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

''This will be an emblem of world culture,'' said Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of English at Harvard University and associate general editor of the Norton anthology.

Greenblatt says he has nothing against a little Monty Python mixed into the highbrow study of canonical authors. But he said Norton intends to weigh current trends with a deep sense of respect for literary ghosts of the past.

''My question is: What are you going to take out to put something in?'' he asked. ''It's like a museum with so much wonderful art. What gets chosen to go on the walls?''

He said Norton will not drop traditional poems and Shakespearean sonnets that have been left out of the Longman collection.

''Some of the changes that Longman has made we will not be making,'' Greenblatt said.

''Our book will be more in touch with the traditional artistic values than cultural assessments of them.''