The myth that schools must regulate writing starts as English shifts to schools (away from home instruction), and schools shift to English (away from classical languages). Its consequences include making English regulation common and desirable, and making language variation a threat. Diverse ways of writing persist, but they aren’ studied in school. Closer to the truth is that language diversity and language knowledge are human rights, but school writing focuses only on a narrow part of a continuum of common ways of writing.

This essay proposes that the English literary anthology is a genre that triangulates the canon, the curriculum, and the classroom. Its colonial legacy is undeniable, and the core processes of anthology editing – selection, excerption, arrangement, and framing – do closely replicate the decontextualizing and objectifying practices of imperial epistemologies. Nonetheless, the anthology remains an affordable textbook and is most popular in nonelite universities and college classrooms where survey and general literature courses are taught as important parts of the English literary curriculum. Rather than dismiss the anthology as a pedagogical tool, the author presents editorial strategies for decolonizing it and for presenting literary tradition in the English language in more equitable ways. Drawing upon her experience editing the eleventh edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL), the author offers a reappraisal of critical theories of anthologizing alongside strategies for reframing the global diffusion of English literature through the power dynamics of territorial, educational, and cultural imperialism.

Russian novels are in intense, ambivalent dialogue with the European tradition; Tolstoy’s take up the British and the French in particular. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reminds us that adultery is an ever-present threat in the British family novel, as it is in the novel of sensation. Like Tolstoy, Mrs. Henry Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon contrast the dynamics of different marriages. They also set adultery in the context of a system that works against women. In Wood’s East Lynne, Carlyle not only forgives his dying ex-wife, but declines to indict her former lover for murder; as he says, “I leave him to a higher retribution: to One who says ‘Vengeance is mine.’” This quote becomes Tolstoy’s epigraph.

This essay provides insight into some of the content of Britten and Pears’s book collection. It draws attention to why certain volumes were used as the source material for various musical works. The essay also emphasises how friendships with writers, such as art historian Kenneth Clark and novelist and critic E. M. Forster, influenced key aspects of Britten and Pears’s lives: their passion for fine art and their faith in pacifism. This survey of the collection underlines why their books are often useful bases of information for biographical background about both musicians. Their library tells us stories about their childhoods and discloses their interests in topics ranging from classic English literature to gardening to the developing genre of gay fiction. Additionally, it adds context to fundamental aspects of their lives, such as their anti-war stance and their enduring commitment to one another.

Chapter 28 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the Anglophone receptions of Sappho’s poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining figures such as Harriette Andreadis, Margaret Goldsmith, Lawrence Durrell, Peter Green, Denys Page, Erica Jong, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley/Edith Cooper), Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, H.D., Mary Barnard,Jeannette Winterson, Judy Grahn, Anne Carson, Josephine Balmer, and Diane Rayor.

Chapter 26 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, England, and the United States, examining figures such as Cicely Hamilton, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley/Edith Cooper), Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney,Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Samuel-Auguste André David Tissot, Sapphism, Honoré Daumier, Pierre Lou?s, Henry Thornton Wharton, and Emily Dickinson.

Toria Johnson interrogates the classification and portrayal of compassion in two major texts: the anonymous morality play Everyman (c. 1508) and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). Taking these plays as examples of pre- and post-Reformation approaches to compassionate interaction, she scrutinises a noticeable shift in attitudes towards the idea of pity, both as a fundamental human trait, and as an organising principle for human interaction. Whereas pre-Reformation plays like Everyman stress the volatility and unreliability of an emotion like pity – preferring instead the more established structure offered by charity – King Lear imagines a world without charity, and without the Church as an overseer of interpersonal exchange. Lear, she argues, reflects an emotional response to the Protestant revision of medieval penitential culture, and in so doing, Shakespeare imagines the possible consequences of England’s new emotional landscape. This chapter examines how the language, structure and ceremony of ‘compassion’ changed in the wake of the English Protestant Reformation, and how these shifts altered the way people experienced or understood the compassion of their communities.

John Staines explores the role of compassion in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688). He argues that although the novel’s attitude towards slavery is complicated, its pathos makes readers feel compassion for an injustice committed against a noble human. Behn’s narrative stands at the start of the creation of the modern novel, a new genre that justified itself as a means of educating readers in sentiment and sympathy. Yet Behn’s decision to end her story by torturing and dismembering her hero is, by the standards of later novels, shockingly indecorous as it forces readers to confront his body in a final scene of compassion. In this chapter, John Staines demonstrates that the appeal to compassion is central to Behn’s text, as it is central to neoclassical discussions of rhetoric and poetics. Oroonoko’s pathos helped it continue to have influence long after its political interventions had passed into obscurity and irrelevance. Its shared suffering endured.