General Reference Works

When I predicted a few years ago that the market for reference books would soon contract like a flaccid balloon, I was dead wrong. Despite the soft economy, reference books appear in ever-increasing numbers to exploit a "market niche." Unfortunately, these volumes are often issued by trade publishers looking to score a fast buck and as a result their quality varies wildly. The plight of many respected university presses these days may be attributed, I am afraid, at least in part to the burgeoning number of mediocre reference tools designed exclusively for sale to libraries. Like foul air in a balloon, they expand to fill the available space.

But to begin with the good news: A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry features 48 essays on a wide range of theoretical and textual matters, with excellent chapters on "Modernism and the Transatlantic Connection" by Hugh Witemeyer (pp. 7–20), "Poetry and Politics" by Reed Way Dasenbrock (pp. 52–63), "Poetry and Literary Theory" by Joanne Feit Diehl (pp. 89–100), "The New Negro Renaissance" by William W. Cook (pp. 138–52), "Robert Frost: North of Boston" by Alex Calder (pp. 369–80), "Robert Lowell: Life Studies" by Stephen Matterson (pp. 481–90), and "Contemporary American Poetry" by Roger Gilbert (pp. 559–70). Similarly, the monumental Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, ed. Eric L. Haralson (Fitzroy Dearborn), contains more than 800 dense, double-columned pages, with entries on individual poets with a critical overview of their work, explications of individual poems, and topics (e.g., "free verse," "Black Mountain School," "Harlem Renaissance," "Little Magazines and Small Presses"). All entries feature a bibliography and a list of works for further reading.

An admirable addition to the reference shelf, The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul S. Boyer et al., focuses on historical rather than literary subjects. It contains no reference to Hawthorne's campaign biography under "Pierce, Franklin," for example, or to Howells's biography under "Hayes, Rutherford." It does include thumbnail definitions of several literary movements (e.g., Romanticism, the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, postmodernism). It mentions the Scopes trial, but not Inherit the Wind, the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee based on it. It contains biographical sketches of every individual author mentioned in part 1 of AmLS except T. S. Eliot (because he does not quality as an American author?), as well as such writers as Poe, Updike, Increase Mather, Dreiser, Ellison, Gilman, and Langston Hughes. It sketches most of the American writers who have received the Nobel Prize for literature (O'Neill, Lewis, Morrison, Bellow) but not Steinbeck, Isaac B. Singer (because he wrote in Yiddish?), or Pearl Buck (because she is so easily ignored?). It also contains individual entries on such social novels as The Jungle, Looking Backward, and The Grapes of Wrath. Similarly, A Companion to 19th-Century America, ed. William L. Barney (Blackwell), includes historical analyses of American politics, economics, foreign policy, and culture. Of the 24 essays, the ones most germane to this chapter: on African Americans (pp. 195–208) by Donald R. Wright, on Native Americans (pp. 209–22) by Michael D. Green and Theda Perdue, on women and gender (pp. 223–37) by Laura F. Edwards, on immigrants and ethnicity (pp. 238–54) by Nora Faires, and on "the communications revolution and popular culture" (pp. 303–16) by David Hochfelder. On the other hand, Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Finkelman (Scribner's), is profusely illustrated with dozens of sidebars, a hallmark of Scribner's reference books. The section on literature (pp. 202–23) is satisfactory but superficial.

Many of the best new reference tools, continuing the trend of recent years, center on race, ethnicity, and gender. The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. William L. Andrews and Frances Smith Foster (Oxford), is an abbreviated version of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature half the length of the original. It contains 242 sketches of writers as well as entries on major titles (e.g., Dunbar's Lyrics of Low Life), sports figures (e.g., Joe Louis), activists (Malcolm X), and others. The editors...