The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature

Overview

Based on the hugely popular Fifth Edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, this volume offers more than 5,500 entries on individual novels and plays; songs and poems; the lives and works of authors, poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers and historians; fictional characters; literary movements; legends; theatres; and periodicals. In adapting the parent volume, the editors have eliminated the most peripheral entries and have condensed many of the remaining articles, while retaining the clear and...

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Overview

Based on the hugely popular Fifth Edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, this volume offers more than 5,500 entries on individual novels and plays; songs and poems; the lives and works of authors, poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers and historians; fictional characters; literary movements; legends; theatres; and periodicals. In adapting the parent volume, the editors have eliminated the most peripheral entries and have condensed many of the remaining articles, while retaining the clear and graceful style that characterized the original. New entries on modern authors such as Jim Crace and Ben Elton have been added, alongside new entries on topics such as travel writing and Anglo-Indian literature. The fully-updated appendices list literary prize-winners, including the Nobel, Man Booker prize, and Pulitzer prizes. The result is a book that readers will find indispensable and highly affordable.

This new volume offers more than 5,000 entries on individual novels and plays; songs and poems; the lives of authors, poest, playwrights, and much more.

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Editorial Reviews

Library Journal
Based on the sixth edition of the best-selling The Oxford Companion to English Literature, the second edition of this reference, which was first published in 1996, has been significantly revised and expanded to offer more current information on authors, literary movements, critical theory, genres, publishers, plays, poems, novels, plot summaries, characters, and more-even coffee houses. Of the 5500 alphabetically arranged entries, 600 are brand new and include topics like Anglo-Indian literature and new writers like Jim Crace and Pat Barker. While classical authors are thoroughly covered, foreign authors have not been given equal attention. Nabokov and Sartre, for example, are covered in much less detail than Oliver Goldsmith or Thomas Lodge. Other entries include two-page historical essays on such topics as Gothic fiction, Romanticism, detective fiction, and black British literature. In addition, an asterick (*) before an item indicates that a separate entry exists for that item, an abbreviated type of cross-reference designation. Novelist Drabble and Stringer, who has edited a number of Oxford references, have retained the style of the original but have condensed the longer articles as well as eliminated some of the marginal entries. The result is a more affordable version of the original resource that makes for an excellent addition to one's personal library and for ready-reference collections whether they be in information commons, dorm collections, or in branch libraries. Although there have been other references covering this topic (e.g., from Penguin and Longman), they are out of print and don't even come close to this title in terms of currency.-Marilyn Lary, North Georgia Coll. & State Univ. Lib., Dahlonega Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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An interpretive history of working class Mexican American, African American, and American Indian women in the last century underlining the specific and common experiences of the three groups. Anderson (history, U. of Arizona) blends historical analysis, politics, and cultural considerations to show how forced acculturation of American Indian women subordinated their traditional powers, the contradictory pressures Mexican American women experience in their place between cultures, and African American women's migration from plantation to urban centers with the subsequent shifts in their social and political situations. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780198605591
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
  • Publication date: 10/17/2003
  • Series: Oxford Paperback Reference Series
  • Edition description: REV
  • Edition number: 2
  • Pages: 720
  • Product dimensions: 7.70 (w) x 5.00 (h) x 1.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble is a distinguished novelist and biographer. Her many novels include Jerusalem the Golden (1967), The Needle's Eye (1972), The Witch of Exmoor (1996), and The Peppered Moth (2001). She has also written biographies of Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995).

Biography

With her shrewd, mannered descriptions and dialogue, Drabble can say a lot. Take this line from The Witch of Exmoor: "He bites his nails between grapes, and avoids eye contact. A mother -- but perhaps not his -- would note that he is too thin." The British author, who has been writing surprising and clever novels for some 40 years, tends to remain focused on female protagonists; but she is inventive when it comes to narration, sometimes where you least expect it. The Witch of Exmoor, for example, has a wry, omniscient narrator who begins with a godlike, "Begin on a midsummer evening. Let them have everything that is pleasant." In 2002's The Seven Sisters, the first section of the book is the main character's (often self-critical) computer diary, and unexpected shifts in perspective follow.

Her variations in narrative structure and her injection of political and social commentary into her works makes Drabble a particularly challenging and interesting writer. Her return to fiction after a seven-year gap, 1987's The Radiant Way, became a trilogy (completed by A Natural Curiosity and Gates of Ivory) that veered slightly into international adventure territory. Ivory, for example, flips between psychiatrist Liz Headleand (one of the three women first featured in The Radiant Way) and the writer friend for whom she is searching, a man who has gone to Cambodia for research. Unfortunately, several of Drabble's early and highly praised novels (including the first two books of the aforementioned trilogy) are out of print in the U.S. It's a shame, because those books are the ones that established Drabble as an important writer, and are the templates for Drabble's independent, intelligent heroines on the road to self-discovery.

A few critics who have been admirers of Drabble's since she began writing in the 1960s have gone sour on the author in her later years. On the release of The Witches of Exmoor, a Toronto Sun critic wrote, "I am so sad and sorry to report that Margaret Drabble, once one of the best novelists on earth, is past her best," calling the novel a "rehash." Of 2002's The Seven Sisters, the story of middle-aged divorcee Candida Wilton's experiences as a newly single woman, a critic for Britain's Observer lamented the book's unconventional and somewhat cagey approach toward the end. "Altogether, Candida is alive enough that the novel's truncations ache like phantom limbs," the critic wrote. "The realised heroines of Drabble's magnificent books from the 1960s or 1970s would say to Candida, Tell me what it is like to be you."

Ultimately, part of the push and shove over Drabble's work comes down to a tension between literary invention and reader satisfaction; she has often been criticized for not caring enough about her characters to make them engaging. The New York Times wrote of The Gates of Ivory, "It's about politics and literature, terrorism and atrocities, love and life and death.... But ideas do not make a novel. Characters do. And we need to care about them, deeply." However, consider The Nation's take: "What I love about this novel is what I love about the best of Drabble's works -- it's rich and complex and allusive and textured and intertextual and takes on the big questions: life and art, representation and responsibility, the possibility of political action, the question of human nature. It's a novel of ideas at a time when most fiction seems deliberately lobotomized."

Good To Know

Possession author A. S. Byatt is Drabble's older sister. There was too much competition," Byatt says about her childhood relationship with her sister. "We didn't get on."

Drabble was an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company after she graduated from college, and was an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave; she married fellow RSC actor Clive Swift in 1960. The two divorced in 1975, and Drabble later married biographer Michael Holroyd.

Also a scholarly writer of biography and nonfiction, Drabble has written several forewords to editions of Jane Austen's work as well as lives of novelists Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. The nonfiction includes a 1990 analysis and critique of property law, Safe as Houses.

Drabble has also written several plays including Laura, Isadora, and Bird of Paradise. She adapted her novel The Millstone as the 1969 film A Touch of Love.

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    1. Hometown:
      London, England
    1. Date of Birth:
      June 5, 1939
    2. Place of Birth:
      Sheffield, England
    1. Education:
      Cambridge University

Table of Contents

Preface vii
Abbreviations ix
Note to the Reader ix
The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature 1
Poets Laureate 718
Nobel Prize for Literature 718
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 719
Man Booker Prize for Fiction 720
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