English Classics Books

One of the superb American autobiographies, and one of the great autobiographies of any period. After reading an example of this calibre it does not surprise me that I am rarely able to read biographies... second hand views, with some exceptions (Philip Horton's biography of Hart Crane, Frank Harris' of Oscar Wilde) are simply not sufficient....those exceptions being almost invariably written by men or women contemporaries who lived and loved in the same circle as their subject.
James Weldon Johnson was a great American, not just a great African American, and a master stylist. This book is a pleasure to read both for its countless wonderful episodes and for the inspiring way of its prosody. He is one of those writers who makes you feel that his wonderful style is an organic product of a graceful upbringing, it is classic and yet unmannered...or rather the manner, being the grace, is the man, all inseparable. There is an additional poignancy in the narrative, especially in the childhood portion, deriving from our knowledge that the nobility of his home education is a thing entirely vanished from the American scene. He went to school, but was also in every sense home schooled. See the autobiography of Kenneth Rexroth for a similar example..."The years as they pass keep revealing how the impressions made upon me as a child by my parents are constantly strengthening controls over my forms of habit, behavior, and conduct as a man." (Along the Way, p. 19, Penguin ed.)
This is certainly one of the best examples of Childhood Autobiography in the World Literature of any age. It should at the very least be required reading in AP English for Black History Month. The very highest endorsement.

James Weldon Johnson (1871 -1938) was the closest American approximation possible to a Renaissance man. He is best-known for writing the lyrics to "Lift Every Voice and Sing", considered the "African-American National Anthem." He was a poet, the author of "God's Trombones" among much else (including the poem "Fifty Years" still one of the best meditations on Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation) and of the famous novel "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" (1912). But Johnson was much more. He served several tumultuous years in diplomatic service as American counsul to Venezuela and Nicaragua. With his brother, Rosamund, and Bob Cole, he formed part of a famed and highly-successful black songwriting and Vaudeville team in the early years of the Twentieth Century. Johnson founded the first African-American high school in his home town of Jacksonville, Florida and, almost in passing, he became the first African-American admitted to the Florida bar without attending Law School (by reading law and passing a treacherous oral examination.) Johnson was a newspaper editor and a founder of the NAACP where he took an active role in litigating against laws restricting the voting rights of African-Americans, and, in particular, worked tirelessly in support of Federal anti-lynching legislation. In the final decade of his life, Johnson taught creative writing and American literature at several universities and lived, for a time, the life of contemplation and reflection that he said had been his lifelong goal.

Johnson lived an inspiring life. And in his autobiography, "Along this Way" (1933) he allows the reader to share in much of it. The autobiography is a lengthy and detailed work in which Johnson not only tells the story of his life, but he also describes a good deal of African-American history in the South, where he grew up, and in the rest of the United States during the pivotal half-century following reconstruction. We can see in Johnson's story, for example, how segregation and Jim Crow gradually but forcefully came to pervade the Southern States in the late 19th and early 20th century. Johnson also gives vibrant descriptions of life in New York City, of the growth of Harlem, and of African-American singers, actors and entertainers on Broadway -- in which he himself played a prominent role. There are chilling descriptions of lynching and of Johnson's efforts to bring this barbaric practice to an end. One of the more memorable scenes of Johnson's personal life in the book is a description of how he himself was almost lynched when he was observed talking alone to a light-skinned woman in a public park in Jacksonville. (His would-be attackers thought the woman was white.)

The book is divided into four main sections, with the first describing Johnson's childhood and education at Atlanta University. Part two presents a picture of New York City and Johnson's efforts as a songwriter. Part three focuses on Johnsons counsular work in Latin America while Part four discusses Johnson's work with the NAACP. But these are only the broadest, bare-bones descriptions of an extraordinary life. Johnson combines his discussion of his public life with insightful comments on most of his writings, including his poetry, novel, his history "Black Manhattan" and his work as an anthologizer of African-American poetry and of Spirituals.

There are moments in the book when I wanted to know more of Johnson's inner life. He tells us, for example, of his courtship of and marriage to Grace Nail but, with the exception of some discussion of her reactions to Johnson's diplomatic posts, we see little of her in the book. Johnson is reticent, in common with most writers of autobiography, in letting us see too deeply beyond the public figure. But at the end of the book, he offers the reader some broad reflections, centering upon his agnosticism and of his hopes and ambitions for humanity.

Johnson's life focused upon his efforts to secure the rights of black people in the United States, but his life, work, and writings were universal in theme. In "Along this Way" he gives us the story of a life both active and reflective. His book is a precious work of American literature.

I purchased this book several years back, as part of the research for my second book. I cannot recommend any book more highly. Anyone interested at all in African American life from the 1880s to the 1930s (particularly as it was lived in New York City from about 1899 to the Harlem Renaissance) should buy it. There is not a more fascinating autobiography in print anywhere! And the life of this man! He was the founder of the first high school for African Americans in the state of Florida, located in Jacksonville (the high school my own mother would attend); the first African American to pass the bar exam in the state of Florida; part of the first successful African American Broadway composing team (after he left Jacksonville and moved to New York City); composer of the lyrics to, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the song long considered the African American national anthem (his brother Rosamond composed the music); a consulate in Nicaragua and Venezuela; the first executive secretary of the NAACP, in which capacity he pioneered anti-lynching legislation (though he was unsuccessful in seeing it pass, the effort is described in the book, and is a fascinating lesson in the machinations of Congressional politics in the 1920s); author of groundbreaking fiction such as, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man"; author of the nonfiction classic, "Black Manhattan." The list goes on... His accomplishments, his dignity and intelligence were stunning, simply awe inspiring. And it is a real shame, an indication of how troubled our culture is, that Hollywood has never made a movie about his life, and he is barely mentioned as a key figure who shaped American culture (notice I didn't say African American culture, I said AMERICAN CULTURE). To everyone reading this review, BUY THIS BOOK. You are in for an experience so delicious it will shame you if you never before knew it existed. It will make you want to call for the resignation of all college professors who do not have "Along This Way" as REQUIRED READING for any course designed to examine the history of American culture.

Finally new studies of nostalgia that see it historically. I can also recommend Ann Colley's Nostalgia and Recollection and Tamar Wagner's Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia - all books that finally go away from simplifying psychobabble...

Although I have yet to read the book, I have heard fabulous things about it and its author.

A truly magisterial meditation on memory, this study is as notable for the insight, wit and compassion with which the author treats his subject as it is for the unparalleled level of scholarship which it displays. For anyone who has ever been an amnesiac, or has ever wanted to be a self, this book is required reading.

This is an admirable volume II, consistent with what made volume I my first choice. In this volume, there are monumental inscriptions, instructional literature (including some very amusing works on the scribal life), hymns (including the great hymn to Osiris, and the Akhenaten hymns to the Sun), selections from the 'Book of the Dead', some prose tales and a factual narrative. Introductions and notes are terrific. Ka's are left untranslated.

Ms. Lichtheim has done a wonderful job in her book, Ancient Egyptian Literature: New Kingdom! Her selections cover a wide range.She has a small introduction to each piece, besides the introductionto the book itself. Her placement of notes at the end of each selection is a godsend, no more madly turning to the back searching for the appropriate notes! An excellent choice for those interested in Egyptian history, or simply those wanting a better understanding of ancient literature. Buy it, it's worth it!

Finally, a collection of good and readable translations of Egyptian literature which both the layperson and the expert will find useful. Lichtheim has given the academic world a much needed reference with the translations of the text and a good introduction to the social history of the creators and the circumstances of the texts being recovered.

I love this book. Mitchell is unfortunately dead, but when alive he could write like an angel. A random example:

"No man is a hero while brushing his teeth or clipping hair out of his ears. He needs some kind of warning that this is the moment to act."

He shares himself (a locution he might mock)as he observes the passing world. If you enjoy E.B. White or Russell Baker, buy this book.

It is unfortunate indeed that such a fine volume boasts just two prior reviews.

One needs only to read an essay or two of those collected here to see that Mr. Mitchell was a well-educated, fully informed individual. But his ability to write in a voice that transcended his obviously cultured status, to make his points accessible to people of all backgrounds in a thoughtful, mannerly, and humorous -- always humorous -- style, is an ability his modern-day contemporaries would be smart to emulate. (Are you listening, Maureen Dowd?? Oh, forgive me -- why would we expect you to start now?)

Still, Mitchell's discretion could give way to much stronger sounding of his opinion, and flat-out satire that was without peer. Even when it did, Mitchell managed to maintain the tone of rationality and etiquette which was the underpinning of all his work, and which is sadly lacking on today's op-ed pages. This indefinable quality -- and the sheer quality of the writing itself -- sets Mitchell's work apart.

Beloved of all long-time Washington Post readers, Henry Mitchell covered everything from his hound to the Mapplethorpe exhibit with wisdom, humor, and profound insight. This is a selection of some of the best of his Any Day columns. Never preaching, but always with a point, Mitchell's writing is so personal that thousands who never met him felt his death as the loss of a wise and compassionate friend. You will laugh, cry, and rejoice that you have met him here. The Christmas Eve battle between the Altar Guild and the Ushers is by itself worth the price of the book. This, and the two collections of his Earthman (gardening) columns, are books to read and re-read.

Snyder has lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills since 1970. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975 for "Turtle Island," he has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, in 1992 and 2005. He is a recipient of the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2004 Japanese Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize.

His latest book, "Back on the Fire" ($24 in hardcover from Shoemaker and Hoard), features recent essays, most previously published, that intermingle autobiography, reflections on the place of the writer in the modern world and a concern that those who have benefited from the natural world (all of us) become more thankful and "give something back."

Snyder sees the world through Daoist-Confucian-Mahayana Buddhist eyes and has little patience for those who romanticize nature with their "quasi-religious pantheistic landscape enthusiasms." In Snyder's "literature of the environment," "we will necessarily be exploring the dark side of nature -- nocturnal, parasitic energies of decomposition and their human parallels." He adds, in another essay: "Nature is not fuzzy and warm. Nature is vulnerable, but it is also tough, and it will inevitably be last up at bat."

Many of the essays deal with the forest, and fire, as a kind of symbol of changing public policy toward the wilderness. "Our wild forests have long had an elegant and self-sustaining nutrient and energy cycle, and staying within that should be a key measure of true sustainability." Periodic low-level fires are necessary for keeping the forest healthy; logging practices that remove the surviving trees after a major fire make it more difficult for the forest to sustain itself. Just as governments have to think in terms of thousands of years in dealing with nuclear waste, Snyder writes, we ought to be thinking of a "thousand year forest plan" as well. Ecology is about process, "a creation happening constantly in each moment. A close term in East Asian philosophy is the word Dao, the Way, dô in Japanese." As he writes in a poem, "--Nature not a book, but a performance, a / high old culture."

The art Snyder advocates "takes nothing from the world; it is a gift and an exchange. It leave the world nourished." "We study the great writings of the Asian past," he writes, "so that we might surpass them today. We hope to create a deeply grounded contemporary literature of nature that celebrates the wonder of our natural world, that draws on and makes beauty of the incredibly rich knowledge gained from science, and that confronts the terrible damage being done today in the name of progress and the world economy."

One November day, Snyder has cleared brush from around his house and sets fire to the pile. "Clouds darkening up from the West, a breeze, a Pacific storm headed this way. Let the flames finish their work -- a few more limb-ends and stubs around the edge to clean up, a few more dumb thoughts and failed ideas to discard -- I think -- this has gone on for many lives!

"How many times / have I thrown you / back on the fire."

Copyright 2007 Chico Enterprise-Record. Used by permission.

Gary Snyder is able to capture in simple words and clear imagery the essence of many of the conditions found in his adopted home in northern California. He recognises problems and poses solutions that are not only reasonable, but possible. This book should be read by anyone concerned with the present state of affairs as regards both the local and the national environment.

These essays, including those written as talks or prefaces to other people's books, are in no sense minor. They are often distillations--not so much argument as succinct statements of profound if still largely unacknowledged truths, simply and generously interwoven with history, anecdote, example, biography and autobiography.

Though there may appear to be no unifying theme, and though the specific subject of the role of fire in healthy forests recurs, this volume is a whole defined by itself, and by the quality of Snyder's observation, thought and expression. For me, the connection between his immersion in East Asian writing, in Buddhism, in the realities of living and working in the natural world, in American literature (Native and non-Native), and his own writing and approach to the world, has never been clearer. That impression is nourished by reading together such essays as "Ecology, Literature and the New World Disorder," "Thinking Toward the Thousand Year Forest Plan," "The Mountain Spirit's True (No) Nature," "Writers and the War Against Nature," "Coyote Makes Things Hard."

Some pieces are short and specific, and thanks to Snyder's writing, evocative, including a short piece on the death of one of the best known of his fellow poets who began in the "Beat" era, Allen Ginsberg, and a fond and informative remembrances of one of the least known, Philip Zenshin Whalen. But even these are important because of Snyder's knowledge of them and perspective over time. Others about particular people and places (especially about Snyder's own family, as in "Helen Callicotte's Stone in Kansas") are also fun to read, but always connect to larger mysteries.

In these essays Snyder writes with warmth as well as pith, and with occasional bursts of exuberant humor. He writes with specific humility, yet is not afraid to state the largest possible conclusions: "These environmental histories are cautionary. They tell us that our land planning must extend ahead more than a few decades. Even a few centuries may be insufficient."

For me, there is another key to these essays in this observation: "Song, story and dance are fundamental to all later `civilized' culture," Snyder writes. "Performance is of key importance because this phenomenal world and all life is, of itself, not a book but a performance."

So these essays can be read as performances, expressing knowledge and experience from a specific, highly varied yet integrated life. This is a book of an Elder, in the old sense. I read it with admiration and gratitude.

of course anyone who lives in new york city can tell you where the white horse and cedar tavern are, but do they all know that where sam goody now stands on sixth avenue and ninth street is the very same place that the cafeteria kerouac wrote about extensively in visions of cody once stood?

this book is filled with a lot of well-known and plenty of not so well known places where various members of the beat generation ate, performed, lived, got drunk in, or otherwise played out their lives. the tours are broken down by area and there are clear directions to help you find where you're going (even if the place no longer exists). each tour also begins with a street map of the area covered and clearly numbered destinations, which was very helpful, although i did wish that the book had also come with an overview map of all manhattan and destinations so that i could more easily combine tours or skip around to places of interest if i didn't want to follow a complete tour.

each stopping place in the tour book includes a paragraph or two on why the place is important to beat history and who/what occured there. although the title of the book claims that new york was "jack kerouac's city," the tours really include many of the other important beat figures as well as a few others that were influenced by the beat movement, such as bob dylan.

this is a great way for beat aficionados visiting new york to get a taste of the city, and a fun way for locals to spend an afternoon or two discovering new spots and seeing familiar places in a new light.

Having moved to New York not long ago, I've been devouring the history and architecture of the city. This book blends the best of both, adding a third party to the mix -- literature. Dividing the city -- mostly Manhattan -- into eight two-hour walking tours, this guidebook offers literary references, beat-gen biographical information, and urban commentary in a useful, insightful style. The book is due an update -- the Gotham Book Mart has moved and several once-vacant lots are no longer undeveloped -- but this book has made for several wonderful walking weekends, and I know I'll retrace my steps in the future.

It would be next to impossible to find these places on your own. Even more impossible to learn as much about each of the sites as is presented in this guide. Each tour follows a logical route and there are plenty of stops that you probably never would have thought of--eg. Serpico's apartment, the former site of Thomas Wolfe's East 8th St. apartment. Using this guide is a great way to see the Village, East and West. And the insight will keep you reading even as you're moving to the next stop. Take your time. Spread the tours over a couple of afternoons. And linger for a while in Washington Square.

A great companion to this book is "The Beat Generation in New York." I wouldn't recommend carrying this heavy book around with you, but after you've finished the tours, open the book to look at the pictures taken at many of the places you've just visited.

I own the more condensed version of this book, and did review it, but there still remains something incredibly juicy about the luxurious tales stored in this book. They come from the time of "parlor tales" where apparently it was the in thing among writers to make up the most imaginative fairy tales possible. And admittedly these are incredibly imaginative, even as one is rolling their eyes as wild characters still desperately conform to French style. No matter what you think of them artistically, they are still thoroughly entertaining and it's a pity that many of the stories aren't in vogue any longer.

Great movies. Great characters

I bought this book when I was a junior in High School because I enjoyed fantasy and the cover was so beautiful; it turned me into a fairy tale scholar. I have since written at least 5 university papers on fairy tales, specifically Beauty and the Beast, and this book has been in every bibliography. I even did my Honors Research project on Beauty and the Beast because of the incredible influence Jack Zipes has had on me. Through this book I learned what fairy tales were really like, not those bowdlerized silly things that we usually read, and I learned that other people took them seriously. The introduction is fantastic background into the French figures whose tales have so far become a part of our culture, and the stories are not the kind you are prone to find in usual anthologies. Along with fairy tale as Myth and The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture,I recommend it wholeheartedly, especially if you are interested in pursuing a scholarly approach to wonder tales.

In Becoming Criminal, with remarkable ingenuity, Reynolds develops and demonstrates an original, purposeful, and conscientious critical approach, what he calls "transversal theory," that is simultaneously poststructuralist, performance-oriented, humanist, and materialist (the book teems with evidence from early modern texts of all genres: plays, pamphlets, poems, state documents, and personal letters). In effect, Reynolds' work is at the cutting edge of the next generation of literary-critical-performance studies, and thus Becoming Criminal may be as important to the next twenty years of early modern studies as Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning has been to the last twenty. But Reynolds's "transversal poetics," I predict, will not just replace the new historicism as the dominant critical paradigm; it will continue to be a major influence well beyond the next two decades, especially given that its methodology is subsuming (manifesting and expanding on much of what the new historicism had to offer), processual (self-aware and open-ended), and necessitates evolution in response to both the changing environments through which the transversal critic travels and the various subject matters she/he pursues. As Reynolds' transversal slogan emphasizes, "Become what you aren't."

I never thought that a book about criminal culture in early modern England would help me to change my own life. I bought the book because I am a historian, but ended up reading the book as a self-help book. Reynolds develops a theory of identity formation and social history that he calls "transversal theory." While reading the book, I came to realize that everything he talks about, except the crimnal stuff, relates to me and my life. Having minority status on a number of levels, and therefore constantly scrambling for agancy and affirmation, I immediately took to Reynolds' ideas. He supplies not only a methodology for academic reasearch, but also for negotiating one's life within their social worlds. By showing me how I came to be subjectified, and how sociopolitical conductors work to constrain me, and by demonstrating how I can become what I'm not as a means by which to become what I am such that the worlds around me comes to respect and celebrate my differences; and, most importantly, by providing me with both the theory and method by which to become whatever I want, Reynolds has inspired me in ways I never imagined possible. In many ways, this is a manifesto for improvemnt through alternative thought and social performance. For me, Reynolds is like an Emerson for everyone today looking to be more self-reliant and to grow in unexpected, creative, and life-inspiring ways. The book is also a fine work of social history, about the relationships among crimnals, space, language, and theater in the time of Shakespeare.

Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England is revolutionary for many reasons and will contribute invaluably to research in the humanities. The big word of the last twenty years has been "interdisciplinarity," and, in my opinion, it has not produced the kinds of studies it implies. While there have been theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization within the humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural sciences, the borders between these fields are rarely self-consciously traversed. Such traversing of borders is among the many things that distinguishes Reynolds' transversal approach -- a theoretical framework he initiated in his 1997 Theatre Journal article, "The Devil's House, `or worse': Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England," that is now taught in all theatre theory and performance theory courses. The fact that Becoming Criminal is truly cross-disciplinary and theoretically-driven in both scope and methodology, and thus important to scholarship in a number of fields (literary criticism, history, sociology, linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, performance studies, and critical theory) greatly distinguishes it from other books on the representation of rogues, vagabonds, and gypsies in early modern English literature. This book has been hugely helpful to me, someone who is currently writing a book on the dramatic and literary representation of highwaymen in the long 18th century. (Look for it in 2006!)

Okay, Michael Meyer has edited a brilliant textbook to be used for English majors and should be used in classrooms in American high schools. Here are a list of the authors and writers that are included in this book: Isabel Allende, Maya Angelou, Jean Anouilh, Matthew Arnold, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, W.H. Auden, Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Beckett, Aprha Behn, John Berryman, William Blake, Elizabeth Bishop, Harold Bloom, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Bradstreet, Peter Brook, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Carver, Tracy Chapman, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Sandra Cisneros, Lucille Clifton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Colette, Stephen Crane, Countee Cullen, E.E. Cummings, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, E.L. Doctorow, John Donne, Rita Dove, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sigmund Freud, Robert Frost, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Glaspell, Lorraine Hansberry, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Hayden, H.D., Seamus Heany, Ernest Hemingway, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman, Langston Hughes, Henrik Ibsen, Gish Jen, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Jamaica Kincaid, D.H. Lawrence, Ursula Le Guin, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Claude McKay, David Mamet, Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Marlowe, Herman Melville, Edna St. Vincent MIllay, Arthur Miller, John Milton, Moliere, marianne moore, bharati mukherjee, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Harold Pinter, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Walter Raleigh, Rainer Maria Rilke, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Christina Rossetti, Muriel Rukeyser, Sappho, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Percy Shelley, Leslie Marmon Silko, Wole Soyinka, Wallace Stevens, Wislawa Szymborska, Alfred Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Susan Glaspell, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Wendy Wasserstein, Fay Weldon, Walt Whitman, Tennesse Williams, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth, James Wright, William Butler Yeats, and many more. What I like here is the lack of visuals and notes that you don't need. You just need the work. As an English teacher, I would like to more variety of choices to choose from. The Bedford is an invaluable resource of excellent choices.

Having majored in English myself, I honestly believe that this is the book that should be used for AP Literature classes or college Intro classes. Not only do you get introduction to the formal elements of each genre (fiction, poetry and drama), you get sound writing instruction, an introduction to critical theory and scholarship, in depth treatment of major authors in each genre(ie Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, etc.)and even some cool selections like a Bruce Springsteen song in with the poems, and an episode of Seinfeld in the drama section. To top it off, you even get collections of World Literature and Modern Literature for each genre, something that expands the literary canon beyond the basics. The questions at the end of each piece are fabulous, really thought provoking. This is a perfect introduction to Literature, especially for AP kids preparing for college level English studies, or for college kids who are only planning to take one literature course.

The Bedford Guide to Literature brings together some of the most timeless and representative stories, poems, and dramas of wesetern culture to educate the reader on such literary concepts as Theme, Plot, Symbolisim, and various structures of short stories, poems, and plays. This book is easily understood by readers of many levels, andshould be enjoyed by all

As good as the Heaney is in presenting Beowulf as a sublime work of art, this more humble work of scholarship deserves equal applause for meticulously faithful rendering the original text. Indulge in Heaney, but fly to Liuzza for the Beowulf that needs no interpretation and no embellishment.

RM Liuzza's long-awaited translation of the Old English epic is a wonderful way for people who do not read Old English to get to know this poem. Liuzza preserves much of the feel of Beowulf, from the rhythm to the alliteration. Students of Old English will also find the book a useful tool for checking their own understanding of the poem. The appendices in the back are very useful, and it's a beautiful book besides. I can't reccomend it enough, heck, buy it in hardcover.

I didn't expect to enjoy Beowulf. It is very old and very repetitive. However, the very interesting introduction and appendices make Beowulf interesting and relevant to modern readers, as well as easy to understand. There is a lot of supplementary material in this edition that gives Beowulf a context to help make it meaningful. The footnotes were very helpful as well. Overall, I liked it and recomend it to students studying Beowulf.