Literary history Archives

authors, books, literary topics, and cultural issues

The first edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature was published in 1932, and quickly established itself as the standard source of reference for students and general readers. Since then it has gone through six editions, the latest of which has been hugely updated and expanded. Of course it’s not the sole work of editor Margaret Drabble. She has assembled a team of 140 fairly distinguished authors (all listed) who have written authoritatively on their specialisms.

The entries are biographies of novelists, poets, and dramatists; and there are sketches of well-known philosophers, historians, critics, and biographers. It includes non-English writers such as Balzac, Goethe, and Tolstoy, as well as figures from other genres such as Dürer, Pasolini, and Prokoviev. It includes mini-essays on genres; fictional characters; famous works (Aaron’s Rod to Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson); famous places, and literary theory.

There are bonuses, such as the special essays on detective, gothic, and historical fiction. It also explains literary genres such as free verse, the epic, metaphors, and naturalism. So if you need a potted account of the differences between ‘New Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism’ for instance, it can be found here, cross-referenced and explained in jargon-free language.

The extras are also entries on significant magazines such as Edinburgh Review and Atlantic Monthly; entries on deconstruction, folios and quartos; the Hogarth Press and Penguin Books; performance poetry and post-colonial literature.

One particularly useful feature is the potted accounts of novels and dramas. I’m fairly sure I will be going back to that, having refreshed my memory of the sprawling plot of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano as a sort of test case.

So, a typical entry runs as follows. This is a literature-related text which had a huge influence in the Cold War period.

God that Failed, The: Six Studies in Communism, a volume published in 1950, edited by R.H.S.Crossman, which marked a significant point in the reaction against the pro-communist mood of the 1930s. It contained contributions by three ex-communists, *Koestler, *Silone, and R. *Wright, and by three sympathisers, *Gide (presented by Enid *Starkie), Louis Fischer, and *Spender (who had been a party member for a matter of weeks only).

There is a detailed timeline covering the period 1000 to 2005. This lists major literary works, and it also records important events which happened at the same time, to provide a socio-political context. For those of us who were denied a classical education, there’s a generous outline of its main authors, texts, and characters – from Aristophanes and Aristotle to Virgil and Xenophon. There are also appendix lists of poets laureate, plus Nobel, Pulitzer, and Booker Man prizewinners for literature.

This is the sort of reference book which you will grab off the shelf the moment you see a name you don’t recognise, when you want to check the date, the author, or the correct title of a work you see mentioned, or if you want to know about ‘The Battle of Alcazar’ (1594) or ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1875).

It certainly gets pride of place in my handy revolving bookcase, alongside the great dictionaries and my local A to Z.

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Margaret Drabble (ed), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, (revised sixth edition) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.1172, ISBN: 0198614535

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what was written and published between 1474 and 2000

What were people writing about as Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or whilst engineers built the first railways in the nineteenth century? This reference book Concise Chronology of English Literature lists the major and some minor works published in every year between 1474 and 2001. Each year in the chronology begins with a list of interesting events, births, and deaths. The later entries also include other cultural items such as films, television productions, and plays.

There’s a big index which lists the authors and all their works listed by date – so you can either see an entry in its chronological context or look up its dating directly. It represents highbrow, middlebrow, and even lowbrow tastes, so the editors have tried to be egalitarian. So for instance, we learn that 1900 saw the birth of the Labour Party; the death of Ruskin, Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde; and the publication of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Bernard Shaw’s Fabianism and the Empire, and H.G.Wells’ Love and Mr Lewisham.

It was also the year which saw the first production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, the Boxer Uprising in China, and the publication of S.R. Crockett’s The Stickit Minister’s Wooing, and Other Galloway Stories – which I have to confess I have never heard of before, and I bet you haven’t either.

Although the entries are short, there is an amazing amount of fine detail. For instance, here are two listings from 1756:

David Hume (1711-76)

The History of Great Britain [vol ii] NF Published 1756, dated 1757. Volume i published 1754 (q.v.) See also History of England 1759

Charlotte Lennox (1729? – 1804) (tr.) The Memoirs of the Countess of Berci F Anonymous. Adapted from L’Histoire tragi-comique de notre temps by Vital d’Audiguier (1569-1624)

The more recent entries – say from 2000 onwards read like a list of best-sellers in the weekend supplements. But then of course, who knows how many of these titles will stand the test of time. Will people still think Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Anita Brookner’s The Bay of Angels summarised the turn of the century? I somehow doubt it.

On some items there is additional publishing history details which appeals to literary anoraks like me. For instance:

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Youth F

Published on 13 November 1902. Contains ‘Youth’ (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine, September 1898), ‘The Heart of Darkness’ (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine, February 1898), and ‘The End of the Tether’ (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine, July-December 1902).

This is useful information for researchers, historians, and detail specialists. All of which might all sound dry as dust – but the strange thing is that I imagine that this will stay at the front of my desktop bookshelf as a useful resource.

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Michael Cox (ed), The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd revised edition 2005, pp.844, ISBN: 0198610548

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authors, books, literary topics, and cultural issues

what was written and published between 1474 and 2000

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