Literature: A Portable Anthology

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Authors

Janet Gardner

Janet E. Gardner was Associate Professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, where she taught courses in drama, British and world literature, and writing for many years. She has published numerous articles, reviews, and chapters on contemporary drama, especially modern British drama and the work of Caryl Churchill.

Joanne Diaz

Joanne Diaz is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is the author of My Favorite Tyrants and The Lessons, the co-editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, and the co-host of the Poetry for All podcast. She is the Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Beverly Lawn

Beverly Lawn is Professor of English Emerita and taught undergraduate and graduate fiction and poetry courses for over three decades. She is editor or coeditor of several literature anthologies, including 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology and is also the author of Throat of Feathers, a book of poems.

Jack Ridl

Jack Ridl is Professor Emeritus of English at Hope College where he taught courses in literature, essay writing, poetry writing, and the nature of poetry for thirty-seven years. In 1996 The Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. Jack’s poetry has been nominated for 18 Pushcart Prizes and includes his recent collection, Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (2019, Wayne State UP).

Peter Schakel

Peter Schakel was the Peter C. and Emajean Cook Professor of English at Hope College, where he taught for forty-eight years. He published numerous scholarly and pedagogical studies on Jonathan Swift and C. S. Lewis. Schakel passed away in 2024.

[* Indicates material new to this edition]

Preface for Instructors

Selections by Form and Theme

PART ONE: READING AND WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

1. Introduction to Reading and Writing about Literature

Why Read Literature?

Why Write about Literature?

What to Expect in a Literature Class

Literature and Enjoyment

*Literature and Difficulty

2. The Role of Good Reading

The Value of Rereading

Close Reading

The Myth of “Hidden Meaning”

Questions for Close Reading: Fiction Annotating

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “The Second Coming” (Annotated Poem)

Questions for Close Reading: Poetry

Note-Taking

Questions for Close Reading: Drama

Informal Writing

Using Reference Materials

Asking Critical Questions of Literature

BEN JONSON, “On My First Son” (Annotated Poem)

☑ Checklist for Good Reading

3. The Writing Process

Prewriting

Choosing a Topic

Developing an Argument

The Thesis

Gathering Support for Your Thesis

Organizing Your Paper

Drafting the Paper

Revising and Editing

☑ Global Revision Checklist

☑ Local Revision Checklist

☑ Final Editing Checklist

Peer Editing and Workshops

Tips for Writing about Literature

Using Quotations Effectively

Quoting from Stories

Quoting from Poems

Quoting from Plays

Formatting Your Paper

4. Common Writing Assignments

Summary Response

STUDENT ESSAY: Taylor Plantan, “A Response to ‘Sweat’ ”

Explication

ROBERT HERRICK, “Upon Julia’s Clothes”

STUDENT ESSAY: Jessica Barnes, “Poetry in Motion: Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ ”

Analysis

ROBERT BROWNING, “My Last Duchess”

STUDENT ESSAY: Adam Walker, “Possessed by the Need for Possession: Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ ”

Comparison and Contrast

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “After Death”

STUDENT ESSAY: Todd Bowen, “Speakers for the Dead: Narrators in ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘After Death’ ”

Essay Exams

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Sonnet 73”

ROBERT HERRICK, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”

STUDENT ESSAY EXAM: Midterm Essay

5. Writing about Stories

Elements of Fiction

Plot

Character

Point of View

Setting

Theme

Symbolism

Style

Stories for Analysis

KATE CHOPIN, “The Story of an Hour” (Annotated Story)

STUDENT ESSAY: An Essay That Compares and Contrasts: Melanie Smith, “Good Husbands in Bad Marriages”

6. Writing about Poems

Elements of Poetry

The Speaker

The Listener

Imagery

Sound and Sense

Two Poems for Analysis

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Sonnet 116” (Annotated Poem)

T. S. ELIOT, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Annotated Poem)

STUDENT ESSAY: An Explication: Patrick McCorkle, “Shakespeare Defines Love”

7. Writing about Plays

Elements of Drama

Plot, Character, and Theme

Diction

Spectacle

Setting

How to Read a Play

Watching a Play

The Director’s Vision

STUDENT ESSAY: An Analysis: Sarah Johnson, “Moral Ambiguity and Character Development in Trifles”

8. Writing a Literary Research Paper

Finding Sources

Evaluating Sources

Working with Sources

Quotations

Paraphrases and Summaries

Commentaries

Keeping Track of Your Sources

Writing the Paper

Refine Your Thesis

Organize Your Evidence

Start Your Draft

Revise

Edit and Proofread

Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism

*Understanding Artificial Intelligence

What to Document and What Not to Document

Documenting Sources: MLA Format

In-Text Citations

Preparing Your Works Cited List

STUDENT ESSAY: Sample Research Paper: Rachel McCarthy, “The Widening Gyres of Chaos in Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ ”

9. Literary Criticism and Literary Theory

Formalism and New Criticism

Feminist and Gender Criticism

Queer Theory

Marxist Criticism

Cultural Studies

Postcolonial Criticism

Historical Criticism and New Historicism

Psychological Theories

Reader-Response Theories

Structuralism

Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

Ecocriticism

PART TWO: Fiction

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog

James Joyce, The Dead

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens

Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

*Paule Marshall, Reena

*Julio Cortázar, Continuity of Parks

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

*Ursula LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Sandra Cisneros, My Name

Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings

*Leila Aboulela, The Museum

ZZ Packer, Brownies

Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

*Simon Rich, I Love Girl

Ted Chiang, The Great Silence

*Carmen Maria Machado, The Husband Stitch

*Anthony Veasna So, Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts

*Jonathan Escoffery, Splashdown

*Etgar Keret, For the Woman Who Has Everything

*Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak

*Morgan Talty, The Name Means Thunder

*Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Home Became a Thing with Thorns

PART THREE: Poetry

Anonymous, The Wife’s Lament

*Rumi, Let’s love each other

*Hwang Jini, Expectation

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Whoso list to hunt

Queen Elizabeth I, On Monsieur’s Departure

Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Walter Raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”)

Aemilia Lanyer, Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women

Ben Jonson, On My First Son

John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

John Donne, Death, be not proud

George Herbert, The Collar

Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent

Anne Bradstreet, Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America

William Blake, The Lamb

William Blake, The Tyger

William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Kobayashi Issa, (“All the time I pray to Buddha”)

Kobayashi Issa, (“Don’t worry, spiders,”)

Kobayashi Issa, (“Goes out, comes back — ”)

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Prometheus

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

John Keats, When I have fears that I may cease to be

John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz — when I died

*Emily Dickinson, could I but ride indefinite

Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death

*Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Learning to Read

*Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

*José Marti, Two Homelands

Walt Whitman, From Song of Myself

William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory

Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask

*Angelina Weld Grimké, El Beso

Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro

Ezra Pound, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo

Marianne Moore, Poetry

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues

Langston Hughes, Theme for English B

Langston Hughes, Harlem

Claude McKay, America

E. E. Cummings, in Just-

E. E. Cummings, “next to of course god america i

Edna St. Vincent Millay, What lips my lips have kissed

William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams, This Is Just to Say

Pablo Neruda, Body of a Woman

Countee Cullen, Incident

W. H. Auden, Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks)

*Julia de Burgos, To Julia de Burgos

Federico García Lorca, Dawn

Gwendolyn Brooks, the mother

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

Czesław Miłosz, Dedication

Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz

Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California

*Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Audre Lorde, Coal

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark

Mahmoud Darwish, Identity Card

Seamus Heaney, Digging

Seamus Heaney, Mid-Term Break

Denise Levertov, The Ache of Marriage

Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

*Adrienne Rich, Power

Muriel Rukeyser, Waiting for Icarus

Gary Soto, Moving Away

Lucille Clifton, homage to my hips

Lucille Clifton, at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989

Galway Kinnell, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Joy Harjo, Fear Poem, or I Give You Back

Louise Erdrich, Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

Louise Glück, Mock Orange

*Edward Hirsch, Fast Break

*Etheridge Knight, Feeling Fucked Up

Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone

Sharon Olds, I Go Back to May 1937

Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It

Linda Pastan, love poem

*Toi Derricotte, The Minks

Rita Dove, Fifth Grade Autobiography

*Charles Simic, My mother was a braid of black smoke

Robert Pinsky, Shirt

Billy Collins, Forgetfulness

Victor Hernández Cruz, Problems with Hurricanes

Philip Levine, What Work Is

Tony Hoagland, History of Desire

Bernadette Mayer, Sonnet (You jerk you didn’t call me up)

Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica

Richard Garcia, Why I Left the Church

*Carter Revard, In Oklahoma

*Eavan Boland, That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

Marilyn Chin, How I Got That Name

Mark Doty, A Display of Mackerel

Allison Joseph, On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person

Jane Kenyon, Happiness

*Jack Agüeros, Sonnet: The History of Puerto Rico

Mary Ruefle, Rain Effect

*Martín Espada, My Name is Espada

Natasha Trethewey, History Lesson

Jorie Graham, Prayer

Taylor Mali, What Teachers Make

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Unidentified Female Student, Former Slave

Suji Kwock Kim, Occupation

Kim Addonizio, First Kiss

*Nick Carbó, Robo

*Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Marilyn Nelson, Emmett Till’s name still catches in my throat,

Brian Turner, What Every Soldier Should Know

Terrance Hayes, Talk

*Terrance Hayes, American Sonnet to My Past and Future Assassin

*Wisława Szymborska, Photograph from September 11

C. K. Williams, On the Métro

Aracelis Girmay, Ode to the Watermelon

Naomi Shihab Nye, Gate A-4

*Lemn Sissay, Some Things I Like

W. S. Merwin, One of the Butterflies

Amit Majmudar, Arms and the Man

*Kay Ryan, Crib

*Solmaz Sharif, Reaching Guantánamo

*Evie Shockley, Tonight I Saw

Eduardo Corral, In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes

*Raphael Campo, Primary Care

Katy Didden, “Embrace Them All”

Ilya Kaminsky, We Lived Happily during the War

Tarfia Faizullah, En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith

*Gregory Pardlo, Wishing Well

Claudia Rankine, (“You are in the dark, in the car . . .”)

Danez Smith, alternate names for black boys

Ocean Vuong, Aubade with Burning City

Fatimah Asghar, Pluto Shits on the Universe

*Rick Barot, Cascades 501

Ross Gay, A Small Needful Fact

Ada Limón, How to Triumph Like a Girl

*Alberto Ríos, The Border: A Double Sonnet

Jericho Brown, Bullet Points

Mahogany L. Browne, Black Girl Magic

Carolyn Forché, The Boatman

Matthew Olzmann, Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

*No’u Revilla, Smoke Screen

Kaveh Akbar, Portrait of the Alcoholic with Relapse Fantasy

Oliver de La Paz, Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay

Jenny Johnson, Tail

Layli Long Soldier, 38

Maggie Smith, Good Bones

Javier Zamora, El Salvador

*Raymond Antrobus, Miami Airport

Noah Baldino, Passing

*Chen Chen, I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party

Kathy Fish, Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild

*David Tomas Martinez, Found Fragment on Ambition

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Self-Portrait as Scallop

Jacob Saenz, Blue Line Incident

Tracy Smith, Declaration [erasure of the Declaration of Independence]

*Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ghazal

*Fatma Krouma, Other Banks

*Sawako Nakayasu, Girl Soup

*José Olivarez, Ars Poetica

*Carl Phillips, Something to Believe In

*Kayleb Rae Candrilli, My Future Husband-Wife and I Make a Blood Pact to Become the Fathers We Always Needed

*Victoria Chang, My Mother’s Lungs

*Natalie Diaz, Manhattan is a Lenape Word

*Alex Dimitrov, Love

*Grace Schulman, Because

*John Keene, Words

*Jason Koo, The Rest is Silence

*Diane Seuss, The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do

*Adrienne Su, My Life in Peaches

*Richie Hofmann, Things That Are Rare

*John Lee Clark, Slateku

*Paisley Rekdal, Have Knowledge

PART FOUR: Drama

*Sophocles, Oedipus the King (Translated by David Kovacs)

*William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House (Translated by R. Farquharson Sharp)

Susan Glaspell, Trifles

*Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind

*Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit

August Wilson, Fences

Lynn Nottage, Sweat

*James Ijames, Fat Ham

Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms

Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines

Product Updates

Twelve new stories—several by classic authors (Julio Cortázar, Paule Marshall), others more contemporary (Carmen Maria Machado, Anthony Veasna So, Jonathan Escoffery, Jamil Jan Kochal).

Fifty new poems—including works in translation by international poets Rumi, Hwang Jini, and Fatma Krouma. Also new: works by contemporary poets Natalie Diaz, John Lee Clark, Victoria Chang, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Solmaz Sharif.

Five new plays—including Alice Childress’ historically overlooked but timely gem Trouble in Mind, Luis Valdez’s ground-breaking classic Zoot Suit, a fresh David Kovacs translation of Oedipus the King, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fat Ham.

New guidance on understanding the role of artificial intelligence in the classroom encouraging students to think critically about the implications of AI when deciding whether and how to integrate it into their writing.

New guidance on reading difficult literature—including a new section in Chapter 1 explores the value of reading literature that challenges us. Students are encouraged to respond to these literary texts responsibly and with resilience, considering historical, cultural, and societal contexts that may alter responses to these works.

Authors

Janet Gardner

Janet E. Gardner was Associate Professor of English at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, where she taught courses in drama, British and world literature, and writing for many years. She has published numerous articles, reviews, and chapters on contemporary drama, especially modern British drama and the work of Caryl Churchill.

Joanne Diaz

Joanne Diaz is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is the author of My Favorite Tyrants and The Lessons, the co-editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, and the co-host of the Poetry for All podcast. She is the Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Beverly Lawn

Beverly Lawn is Professor of English Emerita and taught undergraduate and graduate fiction and poetry courses for over three decades. She is editor or coeditor of several literature anthologies, including 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology and is also the author of Throat of Feathers, a book of poems.

Jack Ridl

Jack Ridl is Professor Emeritus of English at Hope College where he taught courses in literature, essay writing, poetry writing, and the nature of poetry for thirty-seven years. In 1996 The Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. Jack’s poetry has been nominated for 18 Pushcart Prizes and includes his recent collection, Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (2019, Wayne State UP).

Peter Schakel

Peter Schakel was the Peter C. and Emajean Cook Professor of English at Hope College, where he taught for forty-eight years. He published numerous scholarly and pedagogical studies on Jonathan Swift and C. S. Lewis. Schakel passed away in 2024.

[* Indicates material new to this edition]

Preface for Instructors

Selections by Form and Theme

PART ONE: READING AND WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE

1. Introduction to Reading and Writing about Literature

Why Read Literature?

Why Write about Literature?

What to Expect in a Literature Class

Literature and Enjoyment

*Literature and Difficulty

2. The Role of Good Reading

The Value of Rereading

Close Reading

The Myth of “Hidden Meaning”

Questions for Close Reading: Fiction Annotating

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “The Second Coming” (Annotated Poem)

Questions for Close Reading: Poetry

Note-Taking

Questions for Close Reading: Drama

Informal Writing

Using Reference Materials

Asking Critical Questions of Literature

BEN JONSON, “On My First Son” (Annotated Poem)

☑ Checklist for Good Reading

3. The Writing Process

Prewriting

Choosing a Topic

Developing an Argument

The Thesis

Gathering Support for Your Thesis

Organizing Your Paper

Drafting the Paper

Revising and Editing

☑ Global Revision Checklist

☑ Local Revision Checklist

☑ Final Editing Checklist

Peer Editing and Workshops

Tips for Writing about Literature

Using Quotations Effectively

Quoting from Stories

Quoting from Poems

Quoting from Plays

Formatting Your Paper

4. Common Writing Assignments

Summary Response

STUDENT ESSAY: Taylor Plantan, “A Response to ‘Sweat’ ”

Explication

ROBERT HERRICK, “Upon Julia’s Clothes”

STUDENT ESSAY: Jessica Barnes, “Poetry in Motion: Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ ”

Analysis

ROBERT BROWNING, “My Last Duchess”

STUDENT ESSAY: Adam Walker, “Possessed by the Need for Possession: Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ ”

Comparison and Contrast

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “After Death”

STUDENT ESSAY: Todd Bowen, “Speakers for the Dead: Narrators in ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘After Death’ ”

Essay Exams

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Sonnet 73”

ROBERT HERRICK, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”

STUDENT ESSAY EXAM: Midterm Essay

5. Writing about Stories

Elements of Fiction

Plot

Character

Point of View

Setting

Theme

Symbolism

Style

Stories for Analysis

KATE CHOPIN, “The Story of an Hour” (Annotated Story)

STUDENT ESSAY: An Essay That Compares and Contrasts: Melanie Smith, “Good Husbands in Bad Marriages”

6. Writing about Poems

Elements of Poetry

The Speaker

The Listener

Imagery

Sound and Sense

Two Poems for Analysis

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Sonnet 116” (Annotated Poem)

T. S. ELIOT, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Annotated Poem)

STUDENT ESSAY: An Explication: Patrick McCorkle, “Shakespeare Defines Love”

7. Writing about Plays

Elements of Drama

Plot, Character, and Theme

Diction

Spectacle

Setting

How to Read a Play

Watching a Play

The Director’s Vision

STUDENT ESSAY: An Analysis: Sarah Johnson, “Moral Ambiguity and Character Development in Trifles”

8. Writing a Literary Research Paper

Finding Sources

Evaluating Sources

Working with Sources

Quotations

Paraphrases and Summaries

Commentaries

Keeping Track of Your Sources

Writing the Paper

Refine Your Thesis

Organize Your Evidence

Start Your Draft

Revise

Edit and Proofread

Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism

*Understanding Artificial Intelligence

What to Document and What Not to Document

Documenting Sources: MLA Format

In-Text Citations

Preparing Your Works Cited List

STUDENT ESSAY: Sample Research Paper: Rachel McCarthy, “The Widening Gyres of Chaos in Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ ”

9. Literary Criticism and Literary Theory

Formalism and New Criticism

Feminist and Gender Criticism

Queer Theory

Marxist Criticism

Cultural Studies

Postcolonial Criticism

Historical Criticism and New Historicism

Psychological Theories

Reader-Response Theories

Structuralism

Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

Ecocriticism

PART TWO: Fiction

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog

James Joyce, The Dead

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens

Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

*Paule Marshall, Reena

*Julio Cortázar, Continuity of Parks

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

*Ursula LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Sandra Cisneros, My Name

Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings

*Leila Aboulela, The Museum

ZZ Packer, Brownies

Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

*Simon Rich, I Love Girl

Ted Chiang, The Great Silence

*Carmen Maria Machado, The Husband Stitch

*Anthony Veasna So, Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts

*Jonathan Escoffery, Splashdown

*Etgar Keret, For the Woman Who Has Everything

*Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak

*Morgan Talty, The Name Means Thunder

*Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Home Became a Thing with Thorns

PART THREE: Poetry

Anonymous, The Wife’s Lament

*Rumi, Let’s love each other

*Hwang Jini, Expectation

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Whoso list to hunt

Queen Elizabeth I, On Monsieur’s Departure

Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Walter Raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”)

Aemilia Lanyer, Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women

Ben Jonson, On My First Son

John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

John Donne, Death, be not proud

George Herbert, The Collar

Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent

Anne Bradstreet, Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America

William Blake, The Lamb

William Blake, The Tyger

William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Kobayashi Issa, (“All the time I pray to Buddha”)

Kobayashi Issa, (“Don’t worry, spiders,”)

Kobayashi Issa, (“Goes out, comes back — ”)

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Prometheus

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

John Keats, When I have fears that I may cease to be

John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz — when I died

*Emily Dickinson, could I but ride indefinite

Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death

*Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Learning to Read

*Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

*José Marti, Two Homelands

Walt Whitman, From Song of Myself

William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory

Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask

*Angelina Weld Grimké, El Beso

Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro

Ezra Pound, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo

Marianne Moore, Poetry

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues

Langston Hughes, Theme for English B

Langston Hughes, Harlem

Claude McKay, America

E. E. Cummings, in Just-

E. E. Cummings, “next to of course god america i

Edna St. Vincent Millay, What lips my lips have kissed

William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams, This Is Just to Say

Pablo Neruda, Body of a Woman

Countee Cullen, Incident

W. H. Auden, Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks)

*Julia de Burgos, To Julia de Burgos

Federico García Lorca, Dawn

Gwendolyn Brooks, the mother

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

Czesław Miłosz, Dedication

Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz

Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California

*Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Audre Lorde, Coal

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark

Mahmoud Darwish, Identity Card

Seamus Heaney, Digging

Seamus Heaney, Mid-Term Break

Denise Levertov, The Ache of Marriage

Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

*Adrienne Rich, Power

Muriel Rukeyser, Waiting for Icarus

Gary Soto, Moving Away

Lucille Clifton, homage to my hips

Lucille Clifton, at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989

Galway Kinnell, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Joy Harjo, Fear Poem, or I Give You Back

Louise Erdrich, Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

Louise Glück, Mock Orange

*Edward Hirsch, Fast Break

*Etheridge Knight, Feeling Fucked Up

Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone

Sharon Olds, I Go Back to May 1937

Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It

Linda Pastan, love poem

*Toi Derricotte, The Minks

Rita Dove, Fifth Grade Autobiography

*Charles Simic, My mother was a braid of black smoke

Robert Pinsky, Shirt

Billy Collins, Forgetfulness

Victor Hernández Cruz, Problems with Hurricanes

Philip Levine, What Work Is

Tony Hoagland, History of Desire

Bernadette Mayer, Sonnet (You jerk you didn’t call me up)

Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica

Richard Garcia, Why I Left the Church

*Carter Revard, In Oklahoma

*Eavan Boland, That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

Marilyn Chin, How I Got That Name

Mark Doty, A Display of Mackerel

Allison Joseph, On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person

Jane Kenyon, Happiness

*Jack Agüeros, Sonnet: The History of Puerto Rico

Mary Ruefle, Rain Effect

*Martín Espada, My Name is Espada

Natasha Trethewey, History Lesson

Jorie Graham, Prayer

Taylor Mali, What Teachers Make

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Unidentified Female Student, Former Slave

Suji Kwock Kim, Occupation

Kim Addonizio, First Kiss

*Nick Carbó, Robo

*Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Marilyn Nelson, Emmett Till’s name still catches in my throat,

Brian Turner, What Every Soldier Should Know

Terrance Hayes, Talk

*Terrance Hayes, American Sonnet to My Past and Future Assassin

*Wisława Szymborska, Photograph from September 11

C. K. Williams, On the Métro

Aracelis Girmay, Ode to the Watermelon

Naomi Shihab Nye, Gate A-4

*Lemn Sissay, Some Things I Like

W. S. Merwin, One of the Butterflies

Amit Majmudar, Arms and the Man

*Kay Ryan, Crib

*Solmaz Sharif, Reaching Guantánamo

*Evie Shockley, Tonight I Saw

Eduardo Corral, In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes

*Raphael Campo, Primary Care

Katy Didden, “Embrace Them All”

Ilya Kaminsky, We Lived Happily during the War

Tarfia Faizullah, En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith

*Gregory Pardlo, Wishing Well

Claudia Rankine, (“You are in the dark, in the car . . .”)

Danez Smith, alternate names for black boys

Ocean Vuong, Aubade with Burning City

Fatimah Asghar, Pluto Shits on the Universe

*Rick Barot, Cascades 501

Ross Gay, A Small Needful Fact

Ada Limón, How to Triumph Like a Girl

*Alberto Ríos, The Border: A Double Sonnet

Jericho Brown, Bullet Points

Mahogany L. Browne, Black Girl Magic

Carolyn Forché, The Boatman

Matthew Olzmann, Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

*No’u Revilla, Smoke Screen

Kaveh Akbar, Portrait of the Alcoholic with Relapse Fantasy

Oliver de La Paz, Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay

Jenny Johnson, Tail

Layli Long Soldier, 38

Maggie Smith, Good Bones

Javier Zamora, El Salvador

*Raymond Antrobus, Miami Airport

Noah Baldino, Passing

*Chen Chen, I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party

Kathy Fish, Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild

*David Tomas Martinez, Found Fragment on Ambition

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Self-Portrait as Scallop

Jacob Saenz, Blue Line Incident

Tracy Smith, Declaration [erasure of the Declaration of Independence]

*Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ghazal

*Fatma Krouma, Other Banks

*Sawako Nakayasu, Girl Soup

*José Olivarez, Ars Poetica

*Carl Phillips, Something to Believe In

*Kayleb Rae Candrilli, My Future Husband-Wife and I Make a Blood Pact to Become the Fathers We Always Needed

*Victoria Chang, My Mother’s Lungs

*Natalie Diaz, Manhattan is a Lenape Word

*Alex Dimitrov, Love

*Grace Schulman, Because

*John Keene, Words

*Jason Koo, The Rest is Silence

*Diane Seuss, The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do

*Adrienne Su, My Life in Peaches

*Richie Hofmann, Things That Are Rare

*John Lee Clark, Slateku

*Paisley Rekdal, Have Knowledge

PART FOUR: Drama

*Sophocles, Oedipus the King (Translated by David Kovacs)

*William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House (Translated by R. Farquharson Sharp)

Susan Glaspell, Trifles

*Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind

*Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit

August Wilson, Fences

Lynn Nottage, Sweat

*James Ijames, Fat Ham

Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms

Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines

Product Updates

Twelve new stories—several by classic authors (Julio Cortázar, Paule Marshall), others more contemporary (Carmen Maria Machado, Anthony Veasna So, Jonathan Escoffery, Jamil Jan Kochal).

Great literature at a great price.

Literature: A Portable Anthology’s affordably priced collection is a well-balanced selection of classic and contemporary literature for the introductory literature or literature for composition course. The 40 stories, 200 poems, and 9 plays are arranged by chronological publication date within each genre and supported by helpful and concise editorial matter, including a complete guide to reading and writing about literature, biographical headnotes, and a glossary of literary terms. The sixth edition features new literary works by some of the best writers.

Achieve with Gardner Literature: A Portable Anthology features a robust e-textbook and a dedicated writing space as well as interactive close reading models, skill-building close reading activities, LearningCurve for Literature, and reading comprehension quizzes.

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