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  • General Reference Works
  • David J. Nordloh

The pervasiveness of the Internet and electronic publication has for some years brought forth gloomy forecasts of the demise of the printed book. Such pronouncements have so far proved, to paraphrase Mark Twain on reports of his own death, exaggerated. More recently the increasing sophistication of electronic databases and Web-based information services are noised about as threatening a similarly detrimental impact on the print publication of reference books. Instead, the number of printed titles of this kind has remained fairly constant, though with more of them now issued in both electronic and paper form. Publishers aim for every kind of traditional and savvy reader, and they hedge their bets on the delivery-format competition. Meanwhile, in the recent material, history, race, and gender continue to be the primary areas of interest. The only noticeable difference—and who is to say how or whether the limitless search environment of the Web with its capability of delivering every smallest scrap of information is influential here—lies in the number of those resources published in bulky multivolume sets.

The best of the works oriented toward history is the pair of three volume sets issued by Charles Scribner’s Sons, American History Through Literature, 1820–1870, ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer, and American History Through Literature, 1870–1920, ed. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst. The intent of the project, to quote from the introduction to the first set, is to explore “the rich, complex, and reciprocal relations between the literature of the period and the historical conditions that prevailed.” The 1820–1870 portion features 247 articles, the [End Page 539] 1870–1920 one 245, their topics distributed among appropriately selected works, ideas, genres, issues in aesthetics (e.g., art and architecture, the Fireside Poets), institutions or events, places, society, values, culture and/ or ethnicity, and publishing. There are no author entries. The new historicist focus on the bearing of history on literature and the reflection of history in literature is throughout carefully, unobtrusively maintained. The essays are expansive, well written, accompanied by primary and secondary bibliographies and cross-references to other relevant entries within that set (but not to those in the other), and addressed to a broadly knowledgeable audience. The contributors are in general established experts in their fields—Christoph Irmscher, for instance, is responsible for the essay on the Fireside Poets, David M. Robinson for that on Transcendentalism, and Laura Dassow Walls for that on science. The range of topics and perspectives makes for uniformly interesting reading. What exactly dictates the periods of coverage of the sets individually and comprehensively and why the project is packaged in two sets rather than one we are not told; given the uniformly high quality of the contents it may seem gratuitous to even ask. The problematic chopping of history into discrete bits is exacerbated by the fragmentation of some topics, particularly those associated with genre, society, and values. Scribner, it should also be noted, is now an imprint of Thomson/Gale, which also issues the DLB. A continuing proliferation of this series, then, is a distinct possibility.

The Encyclopedia of the New American Nation: The Emergence of the United States, 1754–1829, ed. Paul Finkelman (Scribner), in four volumes, plays by the same general ground rules as American History Through Literature, with appropriately selected topics thoughtfully addressed in signed entries. Also like that other program there are no entries on individual authors (though Cooper, Philip Freneau, Washington Irving, and others can be located in the comprehensive index). The survey essays particularly relevant to students of American literature cover authorship, autobiography and memoir, fiction, nonfiction prose, poetry, and women writers. Finkelman’s preface identifies this set as the final one of four encyclopedias issued by Scribner covering American history from the first European exploration to the beginning of the 21st century; the others are The Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (1993); The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Finkelman (2001); and The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley I. Kutler (1995). An even more [End Page 540] sizeable set addressing a shorter time...

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