The Western Literary Tradition, Volume 2: Jonathan Swift to George Orwell

This compact anthology—the second volume in Margaret L. King’s masterful introduction to the Western literary tradition—offers, in whole or in part, eighty key literary works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The texts provided here represent an unusually broad array of languages and traditions, ranging across a variety of genres such as verse, drama, philosophy, short- and long-form fiction, and non-fiction (including autobiography, speech, journalism, and essay).

This second volume shares with the first a focus on works by women; numerous texts by Latin American writers are included here as well. King’s clear, engaging introductions and notes support an informed reading of the texts while extending students’ knowledge of particular authors and problems of interest.

The Western Literary Tradition’s modest length and cost allow for the use of full-length works—many of which are available in Hackett Publishing’s own well-regarded and inexpensive translations and editions—alongside the anthology without adding undue cost to a student’s total textbook fees.

See the complete Table of Contents for volume 2 here (PDF).

About the Author:

Margaret L. King is Professor of History Emerita, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her numerous books include the pioneering monographs Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986) and Women of the Renaissance (Chicago, 1991); translations of humanist works, including Francesco Barbaro's The Wealth of Wives: A Fifteenth-Century Marriage Manual (Toronto, 2015); the textbook A Short History of the Renaissance in Europe (Toronto, 2016); and four text anthologies published by Hackett: Renaissance Humanism (2014), Reformation Thought (2016), Enlightenment Thought (2019), and The Western Literary Tradition: An Introduction in Texts, Volume 1 (2020).