General Reference Works

African American literature, women writers, and American drama, areas of particular emphasis in reference publication in the recent past, retain their prominence this year, and the usual inventories of categorized authors, historical periods, and niche genres continue to accumulate. Among these segmented perspectives the significant items are several big-topic books, especially a comprehensive literary history by British scholar Richard J. Gray, a four-volume literary encyclopedia edited by Jay Parini, a major collection of essays on the South coedited by Gray, and Christopher MacGowan's Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

The history is the straightforwardly named A History of American Literature (Blackwell). Gray, affiliated with the American studies program at the University of Essex, identifies as his purpose "to 'uninvent' the reading of American literature that sees America in monolithic and millennial terms, and that restricts attention to literature in the sense of the widely published and widely distributed poem, fiction, and play," and to offer instead "the story of a literature that is, and always has been, multiple, conflicted." The mix of both older and newer literary perspectives implied by this overview commentary permeates the discussion. "Reconstructing the Past, Reimagining the Future: The Development of American Literature, 1865–1900," the third of five major sections, begins with a subdivision on literary regionalism, another on realism and naturalism, one on women's writing, and finally one "The Development of Many Americas." Similarly, the final section, "Negotiating the American Century: American Literature Since 1945," concludes with discussions of immigrant, Asian American, and Native American writing. Not obviously a reference book, since its index is modest and the core of the discussion is unsupported by chronologies or other apparatus, and not quite a textbook, since its bibliography too is minimal, this History is above all a highly readable, jargon-free, and engaging one-person look at its subject, the more valuable for both the consistency and the generosity of its treatment.

Readability is also the hallmark of The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, four volumes (Oxford), directed at a general audience and also, according to Parini in his preface, attentive to authors and subjects that "might interest high school and college students." The format, some 2,000 double-column pages, is expansive, as are the signed essays, more than 240 of them on individual authors, 45 on major works like Moby-Dick and "The Yellow Wall-Paper," and four dozen on such essential topics as the Fireside Poets, the long poem, metafiction, and Vietnam in poetry and prose, every essay concluding with selected primary and secondary bibliographies. That the individual entries are solid professional work by major scholars in the field, clearly directed at a wide and intelligent readership and eschewing "excessive theorizing," means helpful and comprehensive presentation. A parallel literary and historical chronology opens the first volume, and a topical outline of articles and a comprehensive index close the last. Parini indicates that there will be supplements to the text "taking up authors and texts and literary movements" excluded for one reason or another from this foundational set. In another of his abundance of essay-collection projects Parini adds volume 2 to American Writers: Classics (Scribner), 18 contributed essays offering close readings of major texts, with an emphasis on introduction rather than critical innovation. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are among the selections. (For comment on the first volume of what is likely to be an unending series see AmLS 2003, p. 579).

Richard Gray and Owen Robinson coedit A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Blackwell), 34 essays by both British and American contributors. These are framed by Englishman Gray's introductory "Writing Southern Cultures" (pp. 3–26) and American James C. Cobb's afterword, "Searching for Southern Identity" (pp. 591–607). Grouped between are two sections: "Themes and Issues"—of particular literary relevance are the essays on slave narratives, plantation fiction, the Southern literary renaissance, African American fiction and poetry, and Southern drama—and "Individuals and Movements," covering seven writers (Poe...