The Longman Anthology Of British Literature

Using The Longman Anthology Of British Literature As a Reference Tool

The Longman Anthology Of British Literature is one of those massive reference books that end up sitting on a desk for three years before you actually learn how to use it properly. It covers everything from Old English all the way through to contemporary work, with thousands of pages of primary texts organized chronologically. The scope is the problem as much as the solution. When I first started teaching survey courses, I bought the big green volume thinking I would flip to whatever author came up. It took me six weeks to figure out that the introduction to each period is where most of the actual useful material lives, not the author headnotes. The headnotes are compressed into maybe three pages per writer. The period essays are thirty to fifty pages of critical context, and that is where you get the stuff that actually helps students. I should be upfront about availability before going further. The complete multivolume set runs around four hundred dollars new, and the shorter second edition condensed version is cheaper but still easily sixty dollars for the paperback. Most people in my position do not buy the physical book anymore. You can usually find a PDF through academic file-sharing channels, though I do not recommend relying on those for citation purposes because pagination shifts between editions. The Norton Anthology has a better digital infrastructure for this, which is worth noting if you are comparing options for course adoption. Longman's own website sometimes offers supplementary materials tied to specific volumes, but the main anthology text is not freely distributed there. If you need it for a syllabus, contact the publisher for adoption copies. They send them without much paperwork if you have a valid institutional email address. Here is the practical approach I use now. I keep the second edition, volume one, for the medieval and Renaissance sections and volume two for the Restoration through modern period. The short anthology version skips a lot of the minor authors and some of the documentary material, which makes it lighter but harder to use for research. Students who only have the condensed version come to me asking about texts that are not in it, and then we waste twenty minutes looking it up somewhere else. It is not a big deal, but it slows down a discussion. The full two-volume set has about 3,200 pages across both books. Carrying them around is its own problem.

The pagination issue is something I did not notice until my third semester teaching. I assigned passages from the 2010 second edition and a student brought up a page number from the 2003 first edition. We spent most of the class realizing we were reading the same text but looking at different page numbers because Longman reorganized the layout. The workaround was simple. I stopped using page numbers in my syllabi and switched to section or act and line numbers where applicable, or I just cited the title and the opening line. That eliminated about ninety percent of the confusion. For pieces without line numbers, like prose excerpts, I cite the paragraph or the heading instead. One thing nobody tells you about this anthology is that the organization is not strictly literary. There are extensive documentary sections interspersed throughout, especially in volume one. These include letters, court records, religious documents, and travel writing. The editorial decision to place those between major literary periods is useful if you are teaching cultural history alongside literature. It is confusing if you are not. I had a student once complain that the anthology was full of random pamphlets and she wanted just the poems and plays. She was not wrong to feel that way. The documentary material does not always have the same level of editorial annotation as the literary texts. The headnotes are thinner and the footnotes are lighter. If you want the documents to land for students, you have to frame them explicitly in your lectures. Leaving them to speak for themselves usually does not work with undergraduate readers who are already skim-reading everything. Another counter-intuitive thing is that the earliest sections, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, are actually easier to navigate than the nineteenth-century sections. The earlier material is shorter in total span and the editorial apparatus is more consistent. The Victorian section alone runs several hundred pages and includes dozens of poets whose work overlaps in theme and form. Students mix up Tennyson and Arnold constantly when using this anthology because the editor grouped them in adjacent sections without enough distinguishing headnote content. I started adding my own comparison sheets now, mapping out the thematic overlaps so students see the differences rather than assuming the proximity in the book means similarity in style. It saves time and reduces the number of papers where someone argues that Browning wrote like Tennyson.

The anthology also includes a useful selection of drama, but the editorial choices there reflect the tastes of the late twentieth century more than current scholarship. Marlowe gets generous treatment, which is fair. Shakespeare is standard. But the Restoration comedy section is quite thin compared to what a dedicated volume would offer. If your course emphasizes eighteenth-century drama, you will need to supplement heavily. I pair the Longman selections with Stanford Encyclopedia entries and open-access archives for the plays that are not well represented. The anthology works best as a primary source collection rather than as a comprehensive literary history. Treat it that way and it serves its purpose. Expect it to be a complete course reader and you will be frustrated within the first month. When I was building a reading list for a British literature survey a couple years back, I hit a wall trying to include certain postcolonial texts from the later volumes. The anthology had some representative work, but the selection felt constrained by the historical scope of British literature as a category. A student pointed this out in a course evaluation and I had to concede that she was right. The book does what it says it does, which is survey British literature. It is not designed to be a decolonized canon. If that matters for your course, you need additional materials regardless of which anthology you adopt. No single book solves that problem. I ended up adding a supplemental reader for the final third of the term and used Longman for the first two-thirds only. That division worked much better than trying to force the book to cover ground it was never meant to cover. The indexing is adequate but not exceptional. The subject index runs about forty pages and the name index is more useful. If you are looking for a specific theme, you will spend more time than necessary flipping through indexes. A better search strategy is to use the chronological table of contents as a map and then scan the period introductions, which often cross-reference related themes and movements. The table of contents in the front of each volume is detailed enough to be useful if you actually read past the first page. Most people do not. They go straight to the index and then complain it is insufficient.

For anyone considering adopting this for a course, here is what I would say after several years of use. Buy or request the full two-volume second edition. Use the period introductions as your course backbone rather than treating them as optional front matter. Cite by section and line rather than by page to avoid edition mismatches. Supplement the documentary material and the later nineteenth-century sections with outside readings. Do not expect it to handle postcolonial or global literature angles on its own. It will serve a traditional survey course adequately if you work with its actual structure instead of against it. There is no free legal download of the full text, and no point in searching for one since the pagination and editorial apparatus vary so much between editions that a pirated PDF is more trouble than it is worth. Your institution's library likely has a copy in the reference collection or as an e-book through a platform like VitalSource or Perlegus. The e-book versions sometimes allow keyword search, which makes up for some of the weak indexing. If your library does not have it, request an adoption review copy from Pearson Education. The process takes about two weeks and they send both volumes if you ask for the complete set. I have done this three times and it has always worked without requiring a formal syllabus submission. The anthology is not broken. It is just large and opinionated in ways that become obvious only after you have used it for a while. The biggest mistake people make is treating it as a complete solution rather than a starting point. Everything else follows from that adjustment.