Although the first anthology of Mexican poetry dates from 1833, Alejandro Higashi argued in his seminal volume PM-XXI-360 that the primary role of the anthology in Mexico changed in 1966. Traditionally a genre that presents a selection of previous work shaped by a certain notion of taste, the anthology took on an overtly prescriptive role with the first edition of Poesía en movimiento, edited by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. This text has remained in print ever since, and has privileged a practice of “demanding poetry” that has been taken up by later anthologies. The chapter also discusses the “cloning lab” of the anthology and how this phenomenon can be discerned in the profusion of anthologies published since the 1980s.

This chapter traces the transformation of the Persian poetic classics from a living textual corpus into a pantheon of heritage objects for the use of national literary institutions. Its focus is on the creation of national literatures for the Soviet eastern republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan from their establishment until the late Stalin period, but it shows how those literatures coevolved with Iranian and Turkish national canons, and with cosmopolitan and international post-Persianate canons. In its readings of the major classical poets Rudaki, Firdawsi, Khayyam, Nizami, Nava’i, and Bidil in modern anthologies, commentaries, and theatrical adaptations, the chapter emphasizes the asynchronous intervention of the classical poets themselves in their reception. The creation of these national literatures was a successful contestation of the representative authority of Western orientalists by national scholars, writers, and cultural officials, which would be widely imitated by postcolonial state cultural bureaucracies during the Cold War. The chapter’s central episodes are a series of anthologies published in Istanbul and Moscow in the early 1920s for Turcophone readerships; the founding Tajik anthology composed by Sadr al-Din ‘Ayni; the attack on the canon mounted by Central Asian radical folklorist–critics; and the Stalinist jubilees for classical Persianate poets.

Historically condemned for their commercial exploitation of poesy, and threat to authorial autonomy, the literary anthology was nevertheless one of the signal forms of literary modernism, in the US and beyond. It was at once a salient means for circulating and preserving verse and a genre in its own right. Although the little magazine has been the more attractive genre of study – both for the form’s closer proximity to collaborative literary production and for their amenability to digital scholarly methods – the anthology often had a symbiotic relationship to little magazines in the modernist period, and has endured as a form for aesthetic and political self-identification, speculative interpellation, preservation, and reclamation, as well as being a mode of reaching audiences beyond the “field of restricted production.” This chapter traces the US career of the anthology from Des Imagistes to An “Objectivists” Anthology, emphasizing the genre’s key importance for Black American writing.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.

Chapter 5 looks at passages of carpe diem within longer texts, such as satires of Horace and Juvenal, Petronius’ Satyrica and Vergil’s Georgics. As carpe diem poems are read and re-read, they become independent textual objects: they can be inserted just about anywhere but never lose their lyric splendour. Thus, Vergil applies the carpe diem motif to a context as humble as cattle-breeding, while both Seneca and Samuel Johnson ignore the context and treat this section as vatic wisdom. This chapter analyses how such excerpts relate to Latin satire, which bastardised other texts, to late antique anthologising, medieval florilegia, and early modern commonplace-books. The chapter also proposes a new model for understanding textual allusions and intertexts in classical literature. Finally, the chapter argues that clichés are important features of classical culture that are worthy of close study.

In his chapter on Proverbs, Christopher Ansberry provides a refreshing introductory approach to the book, not least because he starts with the history of interpretation rather than letting thematic concerns dominate. He identifies five patterns within the history of the book’s interpretation, including a focus on character formation, debates about the nature of its ‘wisdom’ and place in the canon, interest in its reception via matters of date and authorship, the discovery of comparative ancient Near Eastern material, and current, expanding interdisciplinary approaches to the book. A section on the fundamental nature of the book takes on matters of form, genre, poetic features, and the idea of a ‘collection’, whilst granting admiration rather than suspicion to the complexities of the book’s sayings. Likewise, the structure of Proverbs, though containing many parts, comes together into a coherent whole, an ‘anthology’, to which each piece contributes. Ansberry concludes by proposing four ‘dominant’ themes in the book: the fear of the Lord; wisdom; moral order and created order; retribution and reward.

This part of the book considers how to study the work of a poet. It uses the poets Emily Brontë and Srinivas Rayaprol as case studies to illustrate how to build up a picture of a poet’s career, how to get to grips with their central interests and their ways of addressing them, and how to develop a response to a writer in the context of the broader critical debate around their work.

This closing section offers a brief reflection on how to start exploring the rich and varied history of poetry in English.

Taking the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature as an exemplary instance of the canonisation of world literature, this chapter examines the portability of world thoughts through the medium of the anthology piece. Framing the discussion with definitions of canon and anthology, it focuses on the twentieth-century volume of the Longman Anthology to understand world literature's negotiation of the universal and the particular. With the help of examples drawn from the literary works showcased in volume F, the chapter offers an overview of debates in the field of world literary studies around questions of translatability, literary comparatism, the public value of arts and letters, and the language of literature as a mode of cross-cultural contact.

This chapter thinks through the presence and absence of drama and performance within Asian American literary studies. It highlights disciplinary intersections between Asian American literary studies and theater and performance studies by attending to the ways in which Asian American performance has been strategically collected as archives, from anthologies to repositories housed in universities, libraries, and theater companies. Such attention to the dramatic archive foregrounds a retrospective analysis of Asian American plays and performance, and, in its singular vision, is incomplete. In considering these archives, the chapter foregrounds the remains of Asian American performance to hold together both archive and repertoire, through its inter(in)animation, as sites of knowledge making, transmission, and Asian American subject formation. The chapter traces the performance and publication histories of plays collected in three canonical anthologies and ends with a close reading of Genny Lim’s Paper Angels. To recollect Asian American performance is to look again and against the collection of Asian American performance.

The Introduction explains what we are doing when we claim to write American puritan literary history. It shows the development of that field – particularly as it was rooted in American exceptionalism and guided the construction of American literature anthologies – then explains the turn away from exceptionalism and the current state of the field. In the process we define each of the key terms in the title of this book: “American,” “puritan,” “literary,” and “history,” offering a general overview and summary of puritanism. Finally, the introduction lays out the three broader goals of the volume: (1) to introduce teachers, scholars, and new students to the complicated and nuanced tradition of puritan literature in America, set within broad historical, methodological, and geographical contexts; (2) to bring together new methodologies for, approaches to, and analyses of this literature; and (3) to suggest new directions and next steps in the field, including what the contours of such a field ought to include.

First words, we know, matter. The Iliad’s mênin, ‘wrath’, the Odyssey’s andra, ‘man’, set the thematic focus of the narrative to come, the central question of each epic. What is more, the Odyssey’s silence in its opening sentence about the name of its hero and its periphrastic concealment and revelation of its subject is itself programmatic, in its form, for its hero’s performative strategies of deception as well as the narrative’s engagement with the ethics of identity.1 Homer’s beginnings are echoed and transformed throughout Greek writing. Sophocles’ Antigone – tragedy is a machine for rewriting Homer for the fifth-century polis – opens with Ô koinon, ‘O shared’: and the play goes on obsessively to dramatize not just the conflicting claims of commonality in the city and family, but also the dangerous power of the appeals to such commonality.2 Euripides memorably starts his Medea, eith’ ôphelon mê, ‘If only not’, and the play never escapes the lure of the counterfactual narrative, the wishing things were otherwise.