P R E F A C E
A THING OF BEAUTY IS A JOY FOREVER is the first online anthology of British literature edited and published in Bulgaria. Designed to meet predominantly the needs of university students and teachers, it also addresses a wide range of readers having interest in British writing.
The guiding principles of the editor have been two. First, to represent the established tradition of English writers from the Middle Ages to nowadays. Second, to provide selections by authors, who have either been much read by Bulgarian readers in different periods of time, or, for some reason or other, have remained more or less outside the scope of their knowledge.
The range and variety of work by major authors are duly considered, so as to make the anthology self-sufficient, i.e. mostly useful for the convenience of different readers. Therefore, in all periods, a broad scope of authors is offered, together with a great many works, all of them notable achievements in British literature.
Chronologically organized for clarity's sake rather than any other, the anthology is divided into six parts that trace the major periods in the history of British literature. The first volume consists of the best examples of Middle Age and early to late Renaissance writings, belonging to Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, John Milton, etc., all whom have become emblematic for literary mastery and refinement. The second period, from 1660 to 1798, offers selections by authors, who have laid the foundations of the novel as a literary genre - and who, with the exception of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, have been entirely unknown to the Bulgarian reader until about the end of the last century. Third is the Romantic period, from 1798 to 1832, opening with William Blake and ending with Mary Shelley, offers selections from the brilliant poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, as well as excerpts from novels by Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Fourth is the Victorian period - rich and solid as it is, beginning with Thomas Carlyle and ending with Oscar Wilde, it's variety represented best in the work of Charles Dickens - one of the most read English authors ever, Bulgaria included. The fifth period, opening and ending with Joseph Conrad and George Orwell respectively, diverse enough as it is, mostly offers representative selection from the work of the great British Modernists - James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot. The last, sixth period, acquaints the reader with ongoing processes in British literature since 1950, offering him narratives excerpts from Graham Greene through Julian Barnes to Linda Davies, thrilling poetry from W. H. Auden through Dylan Thomas to Seamus Heaney, the last having received the 1995 Nobel Price for literature.
Offered here are also selections by British authors who, thanks to the devotion of Bulgarian translators of different generations, have acquired a considerable receptional biography in our country. William Shakespeare, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, William Blake, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as many more, have long become emblems in the Bulgarian mind. This is a cultural tradition of which this anthology considers itself to be a continuation.
Most of the texts included here though, have never yet been translated into Bulgarian. Printed in the original as they are, they appear for the first time in a Bulgarian edition.
This anthology takes it's title from an English masterpiece, John Keats' ENDYMION: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever:/ It's loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass into nothingness..." A beautiful beginning of a beautiful poem, that makes a beautiful motto to spread it's beauty over this anthology.
Assoc. Prof. Albena Bakratcheva, Ph.D.
Chair of the American and British Studies Program
New Bulgarian University, Sofia