Representative Poetry On-line: Updating a Historical English Teaching Anthology [1997, rptd. 2008]

Abstract

Representative Poetry On-line is the first World Wide Web edition of the U. of Toronto English Department's undergraduate textbook, Representative Poetry, originally compiled in 1912. This article describes the editorial history of the anthology, the contents of the present edition, and the features offered by the MLA CD-ROM version of the edition with its TACT interface. Many pivotal questions surrounding literary databases are addressed: the editiorial history of such a long-standing textbook gives insights into the evolution of the literary canon; the new edition brings to the forefront issues of copyright and of the role of poetry on the WWW; and the TACT interface offers a new way to read and understand texts. Representative Poetry On-line is presently the largest non-profit database of poetry on the WWW and part of the growing universe of web-based literary texts.