The Broadview Reader Third Edition

This new edition includes most of the essays that have made The Broadview Reader one of the most popular first-year textbooks in Canada, and adds 18 fresh selections. As before, essays are gathered into groups by topic, but the editors also provide alternative tables of contents by rhetorical patterns and devices, and by chronology. Each selection is followed by a wide range of questions and suggestions for discussions, and the reader also includes a glossary and biographical notes. Most of the new selections are of recent vintage, but in recognition of the degree to which “modern” issues often have a long and honourable history, the editors have also added several selections by nineteenth-century writers. Also, the reader now includes a full section on “Women in Society.” The book’s balance of Canadian and non-Canadian writers has been maintained, as has the range of different styles and different essay lengths that are included. In all, the new edition includes 80 selections.

D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf’s edition of Frankenstein has been widely acclaimed as an outstanding edition of the novel—for the general reader and the student as much as for the scholar. The editors use as their copy-text the original 1818 version, and detail in an appendix all of Shelley’s later revisions. They also include a range of contemporary documents that shed light on the historical context from which this unique masterpiece emerged. New to this edition is a discussion of Percy Shelley’s role in contributing to the first draft of the novel. Recent scholarship has provoked considerable interest in the degree to which Percy Shelley contributed to Mary Shelley’s original text, and this edition’s updated introduction discusses this scholarship. A new appendix also includes Lord Byron’s “A Fragment” and John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, works that are engaging in their own right and that also add further insights into the literary context of Frankenstein.

Book history has emerged in the last twenty years as one of the most important new fields of interdisciplinary study. It has produced new interpretations of major historical events, has made possible new approaches to history, literature, media, and culture, and presents a distinctive historical perspective on current debates about the future of the book. The Broadview Introduction to Book History provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to this field. Written in a lively, accessible style, chapters on materiality, textuality, printing and reading, intermediality, and remediation guide readers through numerous key concepts, illustrated with examples from literary texts and historical documents produced across a wide historical range. An ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in book history, it offers a road map to this dynamic inter-disciplinary field.

The third Canadian edition of this anthology has been substantially revised and updated for a contemporary audience; a selection of classic essays from earlier eras has been retained, but the emphasis is very much on twenty-first-century expository writing. There is also a focus on issues of great importance in twenty-first-century Canada, such as climate change, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Jian Ghomeshi trial, Facebook, police discrimination, trans rights, and postsecondary education in the humanities. Works of different lengths and levels of difficulty are represented, as are narrative, descriptive and persuasive essays—and, new to this edition, lyric essays. For the new edition there are also considerably more short pieces than ever before; a number of op-ed pieces are included, as are pieces from blogs and from online news sources. The representation of academic writing from several disciplines has been increased—and in some cases the anthology also includes news reports presenting the results of academic research to a general audience. Also new to this edition are essays from a wide range of the most celebrated prose writers of the modern era—from Susan Sontag, Eula Biss, and Michel Foucault to Anne Carson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The anthology also offers increased diversity of representation—including, for example, a larger proportion of First Nations writers and women writers than previous Canadian editions. Unobtrusive explanatory notes appear at the bottom of the page, and each selection is preceded by a headnote that provides students with information regarding the context in which the piece was written. Each reading is also followed by questions for discussion. A unique feature is the inclusion of a set of additional notes on the anthology’s companion website—notes designed to be of particular help to EAL students and/or students who have little familiarity with Canadian culture. The anthology is accompanied by two companion websites. The student website features additional readings and interactive writing exercises (as well as the additional notes). The instructor website provides additional discussion questions and, for a number of the anthology selections, background information that may be of interest.

Among the poets new to this edition are such leading names as Americans Robert Pinsky, Louise Erdrich and Louise Glück; Britons James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy; and Canadians Anne Carson, Robert Bringhurst, and Christian Bök. A number of names who may be new to many readers of poetry are also included among them: Ohioan Debra Allbery, Vancouverite Elise Partridge, and the Cree poet Connie Fife; as with the first edition, the editors have endeavored to include much that is fresh as well as much that is familiar. There are many additions to the selections from poets who appeared in the first edition including selections from the recent work of Leonard Cohen, Les Murray, and Margaret Atwood. As before, the anthology includes work from English-language poets throughout the world from India, Africa, and the Caribbean as well as from Britain, North America, and Australia. Although the selections from the work of poets of earlier eras are largely unchanged from the first edition, there have been some changes; among poems added for this edition are Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Bradstreet’s “Employment,” Dickinson’s “I cannot live without You,” Frost’s “Once by the Pacific,” and Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” As before, the text emphasizes work of the past century; poems from 1900 or later take up more than half of the anthology’s pages. In its first edition The Broadview Anthology of Poetry included biographical information about the poets at the back of the anthology; for the new edition, biographical material appears in a headnote to each poet. Two other features are also new to this edition: the date of first publication is appended after each poem, and line numbering is used throughout. The numbers have been kept unobtrusive, however; as with the first edition, the designers have endeavored to give a clean look to the pages of the anthology. A substantial section on prosody, figures of speech, and so on is included as an appendix.

This book introduces students to the principal issues in the philosophy of mind by tracing the history of the subject from Plato and Aristotle through to the present day. Over forty primary-source readings are included. Extensive commentaries from the editors are provided to guide student readers through the arguments and jargon and to offer necessary historical context for the readings. The new third edition examines some of the most exciting recent developments in the field, including advances in theories about the mind’s relation to action and agency. Previous editions of this book, published under the title A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, have been praised and widely taught for more than two decades.