[Milton-L] Seventeenth-Century Brit Lit Textbooks

[Margaret Thickstun]

I like Jason's approach, as it raises students' awareness of manuscript 
circulation.  The internet certainly opens up the possibility of 
creating a syllabus without having to depend on a particular printed text.

I have taken to ordering two anthologies in my courses--requiring that 
each student have one of them--and then supplementing the anthologies 
with online materials.  (This takes a bit of work, because you have to 
let students reading the Norton know what the Longman's has that they 
don't, etc.)  Everyone reads the same material, but in different orders, 
with pauses to jot down impressions.  I want to make them suspicious of 
anthologies--what are the principles of selection and exclusion?  Anne 
Ferry's /Tradition and the Individual Poem/ has excellent discussions of 
how anthologies work and what makes "an anthology piece."  I also make 
students get older anthologies out of the library to see what was deemed 
worthy to read or representative of a particular writer in different 
contexts.  (This all started when I began teaching women writers, but it 
works with male writers, too.  There are quite a few 17th-century 
writers who were famous and anthologized fifty years ago that get no 
attention now: tastes change, and there is only so much room.)

On a side note, I just found online an 1807 edition of Shakespeare's 
poems that has the sonnets all (to us) higgledy-piggledy and organized 
by topic: "the advantages of friendship," "an invitation to marriage," 
"injurious time," etc.  Interestingly, #20 ("A woman's face") is 
somewhere near the end of the collection and labelled "The Exchange."  
The editor has erased any sense that this might be a sequence that tells 
a story, that the speaker might be an actor in that story.  Instead, the 
reader is invited to dip into the collection according to mood.  Sort of 
explains how Marianne and Willoughby can think of the sonnets as "so 
romantic."

With upper-level students and graduate students I would also recommend 
Margaret Ezell's /Social Authorship and the Advent of Print./  I still 
use excerpts from Wendy Wall's /The Imprint of Gender/ to unsettle 
students' belief in the lonely-garret theory of authorship and to 
reinforce the role of patronage, advancement, and general performance of 
social status in Renaissance writers' lives. 

Sigh, planning courses is really the best part of the job!--Margie


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