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Benito Cereno

“Benito Cereno,” a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville’s most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New World slavery. Narrating the story of a slave revolt using materials drawn from Amasa Delano’s non-fictional account of the Tryal Rebellion from earlier in the nineteenth century, Melville’s story probes…

Billy Budd

“Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever?” asked Henry David Thoreau. The question has never been academic, but in 1924, when Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor was published posthumously, we understood better than ever why. An uneasy if beautiful account of the human cost of realpolitik, Billy Budd, Sailor…

The Piazza Tales

Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in his lifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” along with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands that make up “The Encantadas,” as well as three…

Herman Melville’s “Scorching Irony”

[Brian Yothers, editor of our new edition of Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” shares his thoughts on the history of the story’s reception and its context.] In the blazing heart of one of the most famous speeches in the political and literary history of the United States, his 1852 oration “What to the Slave is the Fourth…

Moby-Dick; or, the Whale: Selections

When Melville completed Moby-Dick, he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne that “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb.” While it took the world some time to appreciate the magnitude of Melville’s achievement, Moby-Dick is now widely considered one of the greatest works of American literature. It is, however, long, and students…

On The Piazza Tales and Its Literary Contemporaries

[Brian Yothers, editor of our new edition of Melville’s Piazza Tales shares his thoughts on reading the stories in their literary contexts.] We often read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville’s most famous short story, as if it is detached from the literary history of its time. One of Melville’s earliest reviewers, however, noted important connections among…

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction

About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous…

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction

About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous…

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Concise Volume 1: Beginnings to Reconstruction

About the Anthology Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, The Broadview Anthology of American Literature balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with a thoroughgoing reassessment of the canon that emphasizes American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of…

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Edgar Allan Poe’s only long fiction has provoked intense scholarly discussions about its meaning since its first publication. The novel relates the adventures of Pym after he stows away on a whaling ship, where he endures starvation, encounters with cannibals, a whirlpool, and finally a journey to an Antarctic sea. It draws on the conventions…

Poems: A Concise Anthology

Presenting a broad range of fully annotated selections from the long history of poetry in English, this anthology provides a rich and extensive resource for teaching traditional canons and forms as well as experimental and alternate trajectories (such as Language poetry and prose poetry). In addition to a chronological table of contents suited to a…

American Literature

AMERICAN LITERATURE The Autobiography of Ashley Bowen (1728-1813) The Female American, Second Edition (1767) Unca Eliza Winkfield Common Sense (1776) Thomas Paine Rights of Man (1791) Thomas Paine The Age of Reason (1794) Thomas Paine Emma Corbett (1781) Samuel Jackson Pratt Letters from an American Farmer: Selections (1782) Hector St. John De Crèvecoeur (BAAL Edition) The…

Glances Backward

Glances Backward brings together in one volume a broad selection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American writings about gay male love, including love stories, Westerns, ghostly tales, poetry, drama, essays, letters, and memoirs. Many of these works, such as The Cult of the Purple Rose, the story of a gay alliance at 1890s Harvard, are…

Gothic Evolutions

The texts in this unique collection range from the Gothic Revival of the late eighteenth century through to the late Victorian gothic, and from the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the short fiction of H.G. Wells and Henry James. Genres represented include medievalist poetry, psychological thrillers, dark political dystopias, sinister tales of social corruption,…

Concert of Voices – Second Edition

Concert of Voices combines poetry, fiction, drama, and essays in an anthology of world literature in English. This second edition preserves the first edition’s breadth and its balance of established and less widely known authors, while including a large selection of exciting new material. Biographical information and explanatory notes have been updated and expanded, and…

The Broadview Anthology of Poetry

“The purpose of The Broadview Anthology of Poetry is to present a wide range of poetry written in English. [Though the poems are arranged chronologically], we have compiled not a historical survey, but rather a collection of poems that represent a variety of times, places and English-speaking cultures. Our selection process was guided by a…

The Broadview Anthology of Short Fiction – Third Edition

This selection of 45 stories, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Shaun Tan, shows the range of short fiction in the past 150 years. This third edition includes more works from the past 20 years and a greater representation of American authors; new to this edition are works by Katherine Anne Porter, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Edward…

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature

“… quite simply, a breakthrough … the new gold standard …” — Michael D’Alessandro, Duke University “… a literary anthology for a new generation …” — Hester Blum, Pennsylvania State University “… a game changer in the study of American literature. I love it!” — Venetria K. Patton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “… it…

The Broadview Anthology of Poetry – Second Edition

Among the poets new to this edition are such leading names as Americans Robert Pinsky, Louise Erdrich and Louise Glück; Britons James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy; and Canadians Anne Carson, Robert Bringhurst, and Christian Bök. A number of names who may be new to many readers of poetry are also included among them: Ohioan…

Meet the Editors of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature

We want to give you the chance to get to know the excellent team of general editors that we have assembled to develop the forthcoming Broadview Anthology of American Literature. We asked each of the editors working on this exciting new anthology to tell us a little bit about themselves and how they teach American…