New Norton Critical Editions of Four American Literary Classics

The Norton Critical Editions series, launched in 1961 to bring out high quality editions of world classics for academic classroom work, has quickly established itself as a valuable resource for both professional and non-professional use. All editions of the series follow the same basic pattern. Each volume starts with an editorial introduction or preface leading up to the authoritative text that is provided with footnoted explanatory annotations. The subsequent selection and documentation of secondary sources is generally divided into a “Backgrounds and Contexts”-section, a “Criticism”-section, a chronological list of the author’s life and work and a selected bibliography for further reading. Yet, depending on the particular work in question or the editor’s predilections, that general framework can be differentiated or enlarged. The following review article will discuss the different approaches by which this framework is filled out (or modified) in four recently published titles of the series.