“The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English”, edited by Ian Ousby

 

1067 pages, Cambridge University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0521440868

I can’t remember where or when I bought The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, only that I got it for cheap and that I was pleased to have such an important reference guide to place on my bookshelf. The editor, Ian Ousby, aided by a select group of contributors, has created a magnificent reference guide to the wide ranging literature written in the English language, regardless of nationality. Over a thousand pages of information on a variety of subjects are to be found within the covers of this book; facts on writers, from Gilbert Abbott à Beckett to Fay Zwicky, can be discovered at one’s leisure, and I find myself time and again referencing this book to find other works from authors, famous and obscure, after having been exposed to one or more of their more well-known works.

Plot summaries for a wide range of novels are to be found, as well (if you are a fan of Anthony Trollope then you’re in luck; you’ll find no less than 25 of his books discussed in the Guide); be warned, though: if you’re reading the plot of a book in order to decide whether or not you want to read it – the ending is ALWAYS given away. The Guide also explores many literary terms that one may or may not be familiar with: Meter; The Bloomsbury Group; Positivism; Post-Structuralism; and many others are defined and discussed and, if for this reason alone, the Guide is invaluable as a reference to these, sometimes, unfamiliar terms, but always in clear and uncluttered language (The Cambridge Guide is thankfully free of academic jargon). Well, why not just spell it out, eh?

• Writers: and not just posts, novelists and playwrights, but also theologians, philosophers, economists, naturalists, scientists, essayists, critics and even historians.
• Individual plays, poems, novels, treatises and other works: works that range from established giants to works written by more modern writers.
• Literary groups or schools: works by any number of recognized schools, such as the Lake Poets, the Bloomsbury Group and the Black Mountain School.
• Wider literary movements: works by a variety of recognized movements, such as neoclassicism, Romanticism, modernism and postmodernism.
• Critical schools or movements: works by a variety of special schools, such as New Criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction.
• Literary genres: all of the recognized and familiar genres, such as comedy, tragedy, fable, farce, melodrama and miracle plays.
• Poetic forms and sub-genres of drama and fiction: all sorts of forms, like acrostic, the elegy, the revenge tragedy, the Gothic novel and even something called Bildungsroman.
• Critical concepts: any number of said ideas, like disassociation of sensibility, hamartia, metaphor and symbol, but not exclusively.
• Rhetorical terms: anything from anaphora, bathos, chiasmus, euphuism, litotes, synecdoche and whatever the hell zeugma is.
• Theaters and theater companies: such as the Globe onwards, to the King's Men, the Federal Theater Project, and the Sistren Theater Collective.
• Literary magazines: everything from The Quarterly Review and Punch, The New Masses and Staffrider.

The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is merely a research tool, but a valuable and useful tool, at any rate.