New Book!
When I arrived as a first-year student at the University of Notre Dame, I was assigned to a first-year seminar which focused on Beowulf and other works of early English literature. The professor had us purchase the 4th edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, a thick green hardback that I had to lug with me from one corner of the campus to the other twice per week.
A small selection of my many Norton books.
But I loved that book, and I still have it—marked up, falling apart, a little moldy, but still very readable. It marked the beginning of my love affair with books by W.W. Norton as both a student, teacher, and reader: anthologies of English and American literature, textbooks for introductory literature courses, critical editions of classic novels, and great nonfiction books. In addition to my admiration for the works they produced, I have also always felt drawn to Norton by the fact it was an independent, employee-owned publisher.
It is thus with indescribable pleasure, and probably more fanfare than it deserves, that I can announce today that MY NEXT BOOK will be W.W. Norton’s The Seagull Guide to the Interpretation of Literature, a compact guide to literary interpretation for high school and college students, especially those taking introductory and survey courses. This will be my first book aimed at students, and my first textbook, but I will be bringing to it the same qualities that I have brought to my work for teachers: a solid grounding in the research on how people learn, and a strong focus on the small, practical steps that readers can take to master the art of interpretation. Readers will find an active learning course in the pages of the book, one that can guide students through the sometimes challenging process of making meaning from works of literature.
The Guide will serve informally as a companion to the excellent Seagull readers edited by Joseph Kelly. It will not contain an anthology of readings; we hope that teachers will pair it with whatever literary texts they love to teach, whether those are from the Seagull readers, the full Norton anthologies, or even OER texts. The Guide will be compact and inexpensive, and of course be published in both print and e-book formats, with plenty of ancillary materials and instructional resources. We are currently anticipating a publication date at some point in 2023.
This collaboration with Norton came about because of the work of a very persistent editor at Norton, Sarah Touborg, who read an anthology that I helped to co-edit on new approaches to teaching literature survey courses. After she read my introduction to the volume, in which I made a passing reference to the “door-stopper anthologies” that were the staple feature of many literature courses, she reached out to see whether I might have an interest in thinking creatively with her about new kinds of texts for such courses. Thus followed three years in which we batted around project ideas, over many e-mails and phone calls and several working lunches. In the fall of 2020 we settled in earnest on a guide to literary interpretation, and with Sarah’s expert guidance I prepared a full proposal and sample chapter, which she shared with ten English teachers from institutions around the country. They reported back with uniform enthusiasm for the book, which sealed the deal for both of us.
I am eager to put together the two halves of my professional life in this project—although I mostly write about teaching and learning, I have never stopped teaching courses in my home discipline of English, including Introduction to Literature and the second half of the British Literature Survey (I’m looking at you, Spring of 2022). And while I am often off giving presentations and talks to teachers on other campuses, I still always feel most comfortable when I am in a classroom full of literature students on my campus, talking about the meaning of a poem or a novel.
Perhaps I feel so pleased at the prospect of writing this book because it does feel to me like coming home: to Norton, to my discipline, and to my students.