Literature: The Evolving Canon

by Sven Birkerts

Book Overview

The new edition of this comprehensive anthology by a well-known literary critic, scholar, and teacher continues to bring a new awareness of how the world of fiction, poetry, and drama is expanding in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0205175155
• ISBN13: 9780205175154
• Release Date: July 1995
• Publisher: Allyn & Bacon
• Length: 1760 Pages
• Weight: 3.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.2" x 6.8" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Texts Talking Back

Birkerts' conception here is to demonstrate how texts form part of a continuous cultural discourse. To do so, he presents for instance Oedipus Rex, followed by Hamlet, then reproduces Freud's comments on the Oedipal Complex as well as Frances Fergusson's article on tragedy as the inheritor of the role of ritual sacrifice. This allows a teacher to present differing critical views and contexts for each work. This approach works well, generally, and I've used this book for an Advanced Placement high school literature course for several years. It would be an excellent general anthology for college use.The range of selections is generous to a fault--the book is unusually broad in its inclusiveness, including in its selection of criticism--and several mini-anthologies (a selection of Gary Snyder's poetry, for instance) within the text make for interesting case studies amid the more general assortment.Chapters on poetic devices and prosody are also complemented with chronologically-arranged anthologies of stories and poems, and the selections in drama are both adventurous in their newer titles and safely within the classics. Highly recommended!