Transplanting the Duchess: Margaret Cavendish and the “Chronic Dilemmas” of Literary Anthology Construction

Abstract

The influence anthologies wield in the discipline of English studies is measured by a case study of the way that the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature managed the “chronic dilemmas” (M. H. Abrams’ term) of anthology construction as applied to the specific instance of the addition of Margaret Cavendish’s “The Poetresses Hasty Resolution” (1653) to the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (2000), as compared to its appearance in the first edition of the Longman Anthology of British Literature (1999). An explication of Cavendish’s poem’s satire as dependent on an understanding of the rhetorical situation of its original publication in Poems and Fancies (1653) is asserted, and the varying extents to which the two anthologies provide the reader with that critical interpretive context are assessed. The resulting cautionary tale illuminates methods by which instructors can best maximise, mitigate and historicise theirs and their students’ anthology usage.

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