Bridges: Literature Across Cultures Review

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(More customer reviews)This book was published in 1994 and contains nearly 300 works by 215 writers. There were 14 plays, 46 short stories and 231 poems. The plays comprised about half the book's 1,000 pages, with the rest divided nearly equally between the short stories and poems.
Slightly more than half the writers came from the United States, another fifth from the West's other English-speaking nations, and the remainder from the rest of the world, mainly Continental Europe and Latin America. For the U.S. writers, great care was taken to choose writers who were female and/or from various ethnic minorities (African-American, Hispanic, Native Indian, Asian-American), and these comprised about 40% of all the writers. As the compilers stated in their introduction, they wished to blend classic favorites with selections from other American cultures and cultures from around the world. Authors for whom several works were selected included Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Louise Erdrich, Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton.
More than three-quarters of all the pieces were from the 20th century. From earlier times, a few selections were included from Ancient Egypt and Greece -- though not Rome -- the Elizabethans, and major Metaphysical and Romantic poets.
The works were grouped according to five themes shared by writers from all cultures and periods: children/families, women/men, caste/class, war/peace and faith/doubt, themes that point to people's common humanity. Some of the short stories in particular were excellent illustrations of each theme: for example, R. K. Narayan's "Mother and Son," Yussef Idriss' "A House of Flesh," John A. Williams' "Son in the Afternoon," Mishima's "Patriotism" and Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." And with the plays, for instance, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun," Shakespeare's "Othello," August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," Aristophanes' "Lysistrata," and Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex."
English-language poets included Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, Shelley, the Brownings, Whitman, Eliot, Yeats, Frost, Sandburg, Dylan Thomas, Auden and Spender. Prose writers included Poe, Hawthorne, Chopin, Lawrence, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Welty, O'Connor, Carver, Shirley Jackson, Lessing, Munro, Alice Walker, Gordimer, Hansberry, August Wilson, Roth, Judith Wright, Achebe and Soyinka. Authors from other cultures included Aristophanes, Sophocles, Pushkin, Chekhov, Akhmatova, Babel, Forugh Farrokhzad, Kawabata, Mishima, Senghor, Borges, Valenzuela, Marquez, I. B. Singer, Kafka and Ricarda Huch.
Of the plays, standouts for me included Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex." I enjoyed the poetry less than the stories and plays, but there was certainly a wide range of interesting poetry that should appeal to many readers: besides those already listed, from Ancient Egypt and Moorish Spain to Swift, Arnold, Mohan Singh, Roque Dalton, Plath, Pound and Kamala Das.
In my opinion, the main distinction of the anthology compared with others read was the large amount of space devoted to poetry, and to contemporary American writers outside the "WASP tradition." Regrettably, the particular selections from many of these latter writers weren't the high point of the book for me, though I did enjoy the works of earlier ones included such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Sterling Brown.
This isn't the anthology for readers looking mainly for writers outside the U.S./English-speaking world, particularly Asia, the Arab world or Africa. No major Arab writers were selected other than Idriss, for example, no writers from China or Thailand were included, Japan was represented by just two writers, India by three, and Africa by six. Nor, despite the inclusion of many excellent pieces, was there sufficient space to be very representative either of, say, 20th century English lit from outside the U.S.: writers such as Mansfield, Woolf, O'Flaherty, Greene, Pritchett, Lavin, Frank O'Connor, Sillitoe, Trevor, Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, Pinter, and so on. That was beyond this anthology's scope.
Within its main areas of focus -- classics and "American cultures" -- the collection overall was wide-ranging, educational and enjoyable. It introduced me as well to many authors I didn't know, which was good. Careful biographical profiles for each writer were also informative.
In terms of works selected, this book is very similar to the McGraw-Hill Introduction to Literature (1994), 2nd edition, by the same compilers. In that book, works by Coleridge, Synge, Arthur Miller and Ginsberg, among others, were also included.

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Both an American and a global anthology, BRIDGES is ideally suited for today's composition and literature courses.It includes over 300 stories, poems, and plays, and features an exciting mix of writers - those who have been the world's literary standard bearers, as well as those who are relatively less known.Together, these diverse, provocative readings encourage the reconciliation of viewpoints - bridges - discovered within them.Thematically arranged, BRIDGES contains a rich mix of contemporary and classic selections, works from men and women, ethnic American, European, Asian, Latin American, and African writers.

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