The Red Badge of Courage: An Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Sources Criticism (Norton Critical Editions)

The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the first edition of the novel, published by D. Appleton & Company in 1895, conservatively emended. As in previous editions, Crane’s uncancelled but unpublished manuscript pages, including his discarded Chapter XII, are presented in an appendix. To assist the reader, the editor has annotated obscure terms and allusions.

Backgrounds and Sources contains biographical, historical, and contextual material on both The Red Badge of Courage and the war fiction genre.

Frederick Crews, Donald Pizer, Harold R. Hungerford, Eric Solomon, and J. C. Levenson provide the framework for understanding the novel as both literature and history.

A selection of Stephen Crane’s letters and an illustration from the battle of Chancellorsville, upon which the novel is based, are also included.

Criticism is a collection of fourteen essays (six of them new to the Third Edition) representing the best of what has been written about The Red Badge of Courage, from the earliest estimates to the expressions of current schools of critical interpretation.

Early assessments by Stephen Crane (in a self-judgment), George Wyndham, and Frank Norris are accompanied by those of mid- to late-twentieth-century critics R. W. Stallman, John E. Hart, Charles C. Walcutt, John Fraser, Robert M. Rechnitz, Harry B. Henderson, James Nagel, Donald Pizer, Amy Kaplan, David Halliburton, and James Cox.

A new Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.

"The Red Badge Of Courage has long been considered the first great 'modern' novel of war by an American-the first novel of literary distinction to present war without heroics and this in a spirit of total irony and skepticism."