Pericles Lewis Carries on Yale Tradition with the Norton Anthology Series

September 23, 2024

Yale’s Pericles Lewis is helping to edit the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, an acclaimed series with deep ties to the university.

Shortly after Pericles Lewis became a full professor in Yale’s Departments of English and Comparative Literature, in 2007, he was recruited by Martin Puchner, a Harvard professor and author, to help edit the third edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, a carefully curated collection of short stories, novels, plays, and poems that has been read by generations of students.

Lewis, a scholar of literary modernism, happily took on “Volume F” (one of six in the anthology), which included literature written from 1900 to the present. He found the experience so rewarding that he agreed to edit the fourth edition as well. And even after being named dean of Yale College in 2022, Lewis agreed to stay on for yet another edition.

The fifth edition will be released on June 1.

About a third of the volume consists of works that I’ve studied and done a lot of scholarly work on,” said Lewis, the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “But what is exciting to me is being able to work on more recent writers and think about how we introduce young people to literature today.”

Read more here.

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