Reader's Guide To Literature In English (reader's Guide Series)

Reader’s Guide to LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Reader’s Guide to LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Editor MARK HAWKINS-DADY LONDON • CHICAGO Copyright © 1996 by FITZROY DEARBORN PUBLISHERS All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. For information write to: FITZROY DEARBORN PUBLISHERS 70 East Walton Street Chicago, Illinois 60611 USA or 11 Rathbone Place London W1P 1DE England British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Reader’s guide to literature in English 1. English literature—History and criticism I. Hawkins-Dady, Mark, 1962– 820.9 ISBN 0-203-30329-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 1-884964-20-6 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available. First published in the USA and UK 1996 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” CONTENTS page Editor’s Note and Guide to Usage vii Advisers and Contributors ix Alphabetical List of Entries xvi Thematic List: Entries by Category Reader’s Guide to Literature in English xxvii 1 Booklist Index 1612 General Index 1716 Notes on Advisers and Contributors 1764 EDITOR’S NOTE AND GUIDE TO USAGE Aims, Scope and Selection of Entries The aim of the Reader’s Guide to Literature in English is to provide informed description and evaluation of the critical writing on a range of topics and writers in the literature of the British Isles, the United States, and the other major English-speaking traditions of the world. In examining the published criticism of recent years, the Reader’s Guide is a reflection of the increasing multiplicity in the field. On the one hand, new discourses and literarytheoretical perspectives have helped maintain the stream of publications on the “traditional” figures of the literary canon, and Shakespeare, as one essayist in the Guide writes, remains “the single most contested site of literary and theoretical skirmish in the English-speaking world”. On the other hand, notions of a canon have had to become more flexible because of, among other developments, the reclamation of women writers in all genres, periods, and nationalities, the increasing attention to writers of ethnic minorities (most evidently in the United States), and the decline of the subsidiary term “Commonwealth Literature” in favour of the more assertively independent and plural “New Literatures”. In selecting entries for the Guide the views of the project’s advisers (listed in the Acknowledgments), the contributing essayists, and other scholars and commentators were taken into account. Two principal criteria were borne in mind in choosing an entry: (a) the existence of a reasonably substantial body of discussion on the subject, particularly in book form, and (b) evidence of strong current interest in the subject. In most cases these two criteria were complementary. Writers and topics that do not receive their own entries—often because the amount of critical literature on them is small— frequently receive attention under more general entries: for example, while books on individual women writers of the Renaissance are few in number as yet, there are several general studies, which are here considered in the entry “Women Writers: Renaissance”. (Citations of all individual writers discussed can be located via the General Index.) The resulting selection includes entries about the literature on national traditions and periods (e.g., “British Literature: 18th Century” or “Canadian Literature”), genres and idioms (e.g., “Travel Literature” or “The Sonnet”), literary theory (e.g., “Deconstruction” or “New Historicism”), cultu