The Oxford Companion to English Literature [Hardcover]

Margaret Drabble (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0198662211 | ISBN-13: 978-0198662211 | Publication Date: November 2, 1995 | Edition: 5 Rev Sub

When the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature appeared, The New York Times Book Review, in a front-page review, hailed it as "a wonderful, infuriating, amusing, and informative war horse of a book" and "a source of real delight," adding "No wonder the book is, as Miss Drabble says, 'much loved'." Now, Margaret Drabble has updated the fifth edition, adding sixty completely new entries and revising the entries on contemporary writers.
Readers will find many new faces here. Drabble has introduced dozens of contemporary novelists, poets, and other literary figures, including Martin Amis, Wendy Cope, Salman Rushdie, David Hare, P.D. James, Paul Theroux, A.N. Wilson, Anita Brookner, J.M. Coetzee, Robertson Davies, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Toni Morrison, and Gore Vidal. There are also new appendices listing winners of major literary prizes--including the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Booker Prize--and a full chronology spanning nearly a thousand years of English literature, from Beowulf to the present day. Of course, the Companion continues to offer unmatched coverage of English literature, from its classical roots (with entries on Homer, Plato, Virgil, and Catullus) to its European influences (from Rabelais and Goethe to Cervantes, Schiller, and Baudelaire). The curious will find information on fictional characters, the plots of major works, literary and artistic movements, critical terms and theory, and much more.
Comprehensive, authoritative, and up to date, this revised edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature offers the most complete reference guide to our marvelous literary heritage.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 8 Up—This revision of the sixth edition adds material but not pages. The chronology, awards lists, and entries include works published through 2005, but entries from the previous edition have not been revised; the last case of Internet censorship cited is from 1999. Of the 16 two-page essays on various genres, only 2 have been given slight alterations ("Children's Literature" has lost its condescending conclusion). This edition contains more information on female and ethnically diverse writers. There are some omissions; for example, Alan Furst is left out of the "Spy Fiction" essay, and Martin McDonagh (The Beauty Queen of Leenane) earns only one sentence, in "Irish playwrights, new." "Gay and lesbian literature," which is no longer a separate essay, fails to mention several significant works, though they are treated elsewhere. Altogether absent from the book are authors such as W. G. Sebald, David Mitchell, and Ismail Kadare. Some choices are puzzling: Denise Levertov has twice Richard Wilbur's space; readers are told how to pronounce "Carew," but not "Bewick" (or Coetzee, Milosz, etc.). Flashes of wit-on "horror": "for every King there are a dozen or more knaves"-and verve ("Lads' literature"), leaven the learning. This is still the title to heft if you need elegant plot summaries, or help with anaphora, isocolon, and their ilk. However, for most purposes the previous edition still suffices.—Patricia D. Lothrop, St. George's School, Newport, RI
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

The publication of the first Oxford Companion to English Literature (OCEL) in 1932 marked the beginning of the Oxford Companion series. Drabble, the noted British novelist and biographer, was responsible for the substantially revised fifth edition, published in 1985, and she also coedited the 1987 abridged version, The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, which contained some additions and corrections to the parent volume.

In this revision of the fifth edition, Drabble has added 59 new entries on contemporary writers; updated previous entries on twentieth-century authors to reflect new publications, deaths, and other events; and corrected many of the errors noted by reviewers of the 1985 volume. Moreover, she has dropped the three appendixes relating to censorship, copyright, and the calendar and inserted in their place an extensive chronological chart tracing English literature from Anglo-Saxon times through 1994, a list of British poets laureate, and lists of recipients of the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Booker prizes and the Carnegie Medal. Interestingly, a number of articles that were added to the concise version (e.g., Foreign Influences, Parody) do not appear in this revision.

Whereas the fifth edition excluded authors born after 1939, Drabble obviously has now abandoned this policy since the subjects of many of the new entries (e.g., Martin Amis, Penelope Lively, Salman Rushdie) were born after 1940. In addition, she has expanded coverage of English-language writers outside Great Britain by adding such figures as Peter Carey, Robertson Davies, Janet Frame, and Toni Morrison. Her continued exclusion of a writer of the prominence of Eudora Welty is difficult to understand, particularly in light of the lengthy new article on Gore Vidal. In most cases, articles on living authors have been revised through 1994, and in some instances, entries note even 1995 publications, such as Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled.

A few other articles also have been updated (e.g., the article on The Oxford English Dictionary now mentions the second edition and the CD-ROM version, and the entry for the Listener notes its cessation in 1991). However, some other entries also could use revision. For instance, Cambridge University Press indicates that "a history of American literature is planned," when, in fact, two volumes have already been published. Also, references from Calendar and Censorship to the now non-existent appendixes have not been deleted.

With more than 9,000 entries, the OCEL is a veritable cornucopia of information pertaining to British literature. While it includes a number of entries on major Commonwealth, European, and American authors, its primary focus continues to be the literature and culture of the British Isles. In this regard, it is significantly different from the Cambridge Guide to Literature in English [RBB Ap 1 94], which has considerably fewer entries but offers better coverage of the English-language literatures of Australia, New Zealand, Africa, India, the Caribbean, Canada, and the U.S. However, the OCEL treats many more minor British authors and their works, individuals who have influenced English literature, and literary characters and allusions. Although the overlap between these two works is substantial, the differences are sufficient that most libraries will want both volumes.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1184 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 5 Rev Sub edition (November 2, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198662211
• ISBN-13: 978-0198662211
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,774,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Margaret Drabble is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. She has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and she is the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A worthy companion, July 10, 2003

By 

FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Hardcover)

The first 'Oxford Companion to English Literature' was published in 1932 under the editorial direction of Sir Paul Harvey (no relation the American radio commentator). Half a century and five editions later, this is still a standard, authoritative reference work necessary for scholars and interested non-experts alike.

Under the editorship of Margaret Drabble, author and biographer (known for 'The Witch of Exmoor' and the more recently published 'The Peppered Moth'), this volume remains faithful to Harvey's intention of placing English literature in its widest possible context while exploring the deep classical and continental connections that underpin much of the history.

How can literature be divorced from cultural context? Surely it cannot be -- hence the newest entries into the edition include topics that read as if they were taken from today's best-seller shelf:

- Anglo-Indian Literature
- Simon Armitage
- Kate Atkinson
- Louis de Bernieres
- Censorship

- Ben Elton
- Gay and lesbian literature
- Hypertext
- A. L. Kennedy
- Lad's literature
- Literature of science
- New Criticism
- New Irish Playwrights
- Carol Shields
- Travel writing

This sample listing of the latest entries is representative of the more established categories, in that the entries (encyclopedic in character) include Authors, Subjects, Titles, Events, Characters and Critical Theory. The entries are unsigned (an ever-controversial practice in reference works such as this) -- well over a hundred contributors assisted in this volume, including the likes of Matthew Sweet, Salman Rushdie, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Katherine Duncan-Jones, and Brian Vickers.

This volume serves the general reader well in that one may follow cross-reference trails through the text. Take, for instance, Aaron the Moor -- the reader will be directed to Titus Andronicus, to which one is directed to Shakespeare, and from there a host of other cross-references historical and modern. Under the entry of Gabriel Josipovici, one is led back the entries of Rabelais and Bellow, influences as well as objects of Josipovici's study.

The appendices are new features of this edition. The first appendix is a Chronology that lists the chronology of the production of English literature from c.1000 to 1999 side by side with major historical events in Britain and beyond, and the significant events in the lives of literary figures. Appendix 2 lists the Poets Laureate in chronological order, from 1619 (when the office unofficially began) to the present -- surprisingly, there have only been 21 (19 official). Appendix 3 lists major literary award winners: Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Library Association Carnegie Medalists, and Booker-McConnell Prize for Fiction. Obviously not all of these are British authors, but it helps to place British literature in the wider world context of the twentieth century (as all of these prizes are twentieth-century creations).

In addition to the encyclopedic entries, there are major essays scattered through the text. These include the following topics:

- Biography
- Black British Literature
- Children's Literature
- Detective Fiction
- Fantasy Fiction
- Ghost Stories
- Gothic Fiction
- Historical Fiction
- Metre
- Modernism
- Post-Colonial Literature
- Romanticism
- Science Fiction
- Spy Fiction
- Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

These essays include history and current development of the genre or topic, as well as bibliographic information for further research, which (regrettably) the smaller encyclopedic entries rarely have.

This is a terrific, one-volume reference that should serve well anyone with a need for quick and ready reference material. It should find a welcome home on the shelf of any avid reader, fan of literature and modern fiction, history, religion, or any devoted Anglophile.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You will wonder how you lived without this book., April 18, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Hardcover)

This is one book I turn to over and over again. My copy is well worn and much loved. If I could have only one reference book, this would be it. You will wonder what you did before you had this book! A must for lovers of literature

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-have companion for anyone who loves to read, May 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Hardcover)

This is one of the most practical reference books in my home library. I turn to it again and again for plot summaries and information about authors. I also find it useful for pre- (and post-) theater reading. And of course it's a real boon for solving the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.

A must-have for anyone who considers themself a reader.