Beaty, Jerome : Emory University

Jerome Beaty is professor of English at Emory University. He is the author of Middlemarch: From Notebook to Novel and the forthcoming Misreading Jane Eyre. He is also the editor of Poetry: From Statement to Meaning, The Norton Introduction to the Short Novel, and, with J. Paul Hunter, The Norton Introduction to Literature and New Worlds of Literature.

The Norton Introduction to Fiction offers in a single volume a complete course in reading and writing about fiction. It is both an anthology and a textbook--a teaching anthology--combining classic and contemporary stories and offering lively, student-oriented help with reading fiction and writing about it.

* New classic and contemporary stories
Of the fifty-four stories in the Sixth Edition, nineteen are new. Newly selected classroom favorites include Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Julio Cortázar's Blow-Up, Margaret Laurence's The Loons, Eudora Welty's Why I Live at the P.O., and Edith Wharton's The Other Two; new stories by contemporary writers include Margaret Atwood's Happy Endings, Toni Cade Bambara's Gorilla, My Love, Charles Baxter's Fenstad's Mother, Denise Chávez's The Last of the Menu Girls, Ha Jin's In Broad Daylight, and Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Watcher.

* New "Exploring Contexts" chapters
The Norton Introduction to Fiction gives unique and imaginative attention to reading texts in different contexts--to introducing students to the broad range of contextual issues that surround and inform both the creative process and the reading of literature. In four "Exploring Contexts" chapters, stories are placed in rich contextual groups--authorial, cultural, and literary--to illuminate connections among texts and the influences that shaped them.

Fiction: Reading, Responding, Writing

Understanding the Text

1. Plot
2. Point of View
3. Characterization
4. Setting
5. Symbols
6. Theme
7. The Whole Text

Exploring Contexts

8. The Author's Work as Context: D. H. Lawrence and Flannery O'Connor
9. Culture as Context: Border Stories
10. Literary Kind as Context: Initiation Stories
11. Form as Context: The Short Short Story and the Novel

Evaluating Fiction
Reading More Fiction
Writing about Fiction
Biographical Sketches
Index of Authors
Index of Titles