Shirley Kossick
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (6th edition) edited by Margaret Drabble
Ever since Sir Paul Harvey’s first edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature in 1932, its place as the standard literary reference work for both students and the general reader has been established. With its extensive revisions, updating and more than 600 new entries, this 1 172-page edition seems likely to retain that leading position.
As with any compilation of this kind, however, it is not possible to please all the people all the time and quibbles inevitably arise. One might query the cut-off dates of publications, for instance, which is not consistently applied. While the entries for Ian McEwan, Carol Shields and Beryl Bainbridge run up to 1998, those for William Trevor, VS Naipaul, Alan Bennett and Margaret Atwood end at 1994. Martin Amis, Bernice Rubens, Rose Tremain and Anita Brookner are all cut short at 1997, and Timothy Mo’s entry gets no further than 1991. In contrast, the 1999 deaths of Iris Murdoch and Brian Moore are noted.
All of this suggests a rather vague editorial policy, borne out by the idiosyncrasies of entry weighting and exclusions. Of the latter, one might mention Madeleine St John, Martin Booth and Sue Townsend, all of whom have a notable body of work to their names.
On the other hand (lest fault-finding become an end in itself), the new additions rightly incorporate many noteworthy contemporary novelists, poets and dramatists, as well as more critical and biographical writers. Welcome additions include Victoria Glendinning, Clair Tomalin, Armistead Maupin, Gore Vidal and Margaret Forster. Drabble herself also makes a first appearance, having modestly been omitted previously.
The two-page essays that featured sparsely in the earlier edition are now much augmented to cover such genres as science fiction, black British writing, fantasy, gothic and historical fiction. Though the children’s literature section is both inadequate and out of date, most of the essays are illuminating, precise and pithy. Modernism, post-colonial literature and structuralism all receive expert attention and the essays are easily located by their black-edged pages.
Although feminism receives no separate entry and feminist criticism only one column, the upsurge in feminist writing since World War II is well covered and many formerly neglected figures are included. Tribute is paid to such feminists as Germaine Greer and Carmen Callil who helped to enlarge the canon by publishing new and key out-of-print titles.
Again one may wonder about certain conspicuous absentees (Kate Millet, Betty Friedan?). But then, as realistically remarked in the preface, the aim is to be illustrative rather than encyclopaedic and the updatings do signal the wide range of contemporary English literature. Also valuable are three appendices listing the poets laureate and major 20th-century literary awards. The third and most useful is a chronology giving important cultural and historical events in parallel.
Inevitably errors have slipped through (even some from the previous edition) but, on the whole, this Companion remains, as the jacket claims, “the most complete guide to English literary culture available”. And, one might add, the most manageable, clear, well cross-referenced and convenient too.