Carefully assembled based on a survey of print adopters, this core selections ebook offers an assortment of works from the most trusted anthology. The ebook is also accompanied by dynamic and easy-to-access digital resources.

Stephen Greenblatt argued in these celebrated essays that the art of the Renaissance could only be understood in the context of the society from which it sprang. His approach - 'New Historicism' - drew from history, anthropology, Marxist theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis and in the process, blew apart the academic boundaries insulating literature from the world around it. Learning to Curse charts the evolution of that approach and provides a vivid and compelling exploration of a complex and contradictory epoch.

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also available for the first time as a Norton Illumine Ebook—the digital edition provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

These individual volumes extracted from The Norton Shakespeare bring to readers a meticulously edited new text that reflects current textual-editing scholarship and introduces innovative teaching features. The print and digital bundles offer students a great reading experience in two ways-printed volumes for their lifetime library and digital editions ideal for in-class use. Every introduction, note, gloss and bibliography has been reconsidered in light of reviewers' suggestions, and new textual introductions and performance notes reflect the extensive new scholarship in these fields. The ebooks are accessed with The Norton Shakespeare Digital Edition registration code included in the print volumes.

The attractive print and digital bundle offers students a great reading experience at an affordable price in two ways-a hardcover volume for their dorm shelf and lifetime library, and a digital edition ideal for in-class use. Students can access the ebook from their computer, tablet, or smartphone via the registration code included in the print volume at no additional charge. As one instructor summed it up, "It's a long overdue step forward in the way Shakespeare is taught."

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also available for the first time as a Norton Illumine Ebook—the digital edition provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also available for the first time as a Norton Illumine Ebook—the digital edition provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also available for the first time as a Norton Illumine Ebook—the digital edition provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright's insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. Examining the psyche-and psychoses-of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear and Coriolanus, Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the disasters visited upon the societies over which these characters rule. Tyrant shows that Shakespeare's work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge them.

In "Hamlet in Purgatory," renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of "Hamlet."

In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false "poem," they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly "prison house of souls" had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition.

With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost.

This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers.

This expanded Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also available for the first time as a Norton Illumine Ebook—the digital edition provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

Stephen Greenblatt is one of the most influential practitioners of new historicism. This Reader makes available in one volume Greenblatt's most important writings on culture, Renaissance studies, and Shakespeare. It also features occasional pieces on subjects as diverse as story-telling and miracles, demonstrating the range of his cultural interests. Taken together, the texts collected here dispel the idea that new historicism is antithetical to literary and aesthetic value.

Three hundred years before the publication of Machiavelli s The Prince, a now virtually unknown parable became the medieval equivalent of a runaway bestseller. Whereas Machiavelli taught kings how to manipulate their subjects, Reynard the Fox demonstrated how clever subjects could outwit both their kings and enemies alike. Despite its immense popularity at the time, this brains-over-brawn parable largely disappeared, but it reemerges in this rollicking translation by the renowned medieval scholar James Simpson. In these pages the wily Reynard cons the likes of Tybert the Cat, Bruin the Bear, and Isengrim the Wolf, among others, exposing the arrogance, greed, and overweening hypocrisy of the so-called civilized. Cleverly disguised as a tale about the animal kingdom, Simpson s translation of the late-middle-English version restores Reynard as part of a tradition that extends all the way to Orwell s Animal Farm. Highlighted with all new illustrations, Reynard the Fox is the animal fable s version of Homer s Odyssey (Stephen Greenblatt)."

A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as seen through Shakespeare and Freud
 
In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realization or failure of second chances―outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone.
 
Through a series of illuminating readings, the authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter’s Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, “it is the mending that matters.”

Stephen Greenblatt argued in these celebrated essays that the art of the Renaissance could only be understood in the context of the society from which it sprang. His approach - 'New Historicism' - drew from history, anthropology, Marxist theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis and in the process, blew apart the academic boundaries insulating literature from the world around it.

Learning to Curse charts the evolution of that approach and provides a vivid and compelling exploration of a complex and contradictory epoch.

In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His discovery, Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years. It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging to human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined, and that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. Its return to circulation changed the course of history. The poem's vision would shape the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and-in the hands of Thomas Jefferson-leave its trace on the Declaration of Independence. From the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the dark chambers of monastic scriptoria during the Middle Ages to the cynical, competitive court of a corrupt and dangerous pope, Greenblatt brings Poggio's search and discovery to life in a way that deepens our understanding of the world we live in now. "An intellectually invigorating, nonfiction version of a Dan Brown-like mystery-in-the-archives thriller." -Boston Globe

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes--of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling "Will in the World," shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers.
Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare's preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare's works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare's interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in "Measure for Measure." Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority--that is, Shakespeare's deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.
A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare's Freedom" is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

"Renaissance Self-Fashioning "is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance--More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare--and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, "Renaissance Self-Fashioning" continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence.
"No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."--Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world's greatest playwright.

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is widely recognised to be the fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare's life, his work and his age. Shakespeare was a man of his time, constantly engaging with his audience's deepest desires and fears, and by reconnecting with this historic reality we are able to experience the true character of the playwright himself. Greenblatt traces Shakespeare's unfolding imaginative generosity - his ability to inhabit others, to confer upon them his own strength of spirit, to make them truly live as independent beings as no other artist has ever done. Digging deep into the vital links between the playwright and his world, Will in the World provides the fullest account ever written of the living, breathing man behind the masterpieces.

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

`And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of all of them I have taken possession for their highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no one contradicted me' - Christopher Columbus Marvelous Possessions is a study of the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, in particular the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was cunningly yoked by Columbus and others to the service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to breaking-point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that the experience of the marvelous is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as Herodotus, Jean de Lery, and Montaigne - and notably in Mandeville's Travels, the most popular travel book of the Middle Ages - wonder is the sign of a remarkably tolerant recognition of cultural difference.

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the centre of a major shift in literary interpretation towards a critical method that places cultural creation in history. In this book - a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method - he asks how collective beliefs and experiences are shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable form, and offered to the public on the stage. As well as giving us a new way of understanding Shakespeare's achievement, the book is an original analysis of a cultural process. Shakespearean Negotiations provides significant insights into Henry IV and Henry V, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Tempest; it also includes fascinating analyses of such aspects of early modern culture as exorcism, cross-dressing, colonial propaganda, and martial law codes. It is, as well, a masterly example of a new critical method by its leading practitioner.