The Cambridge guide to literature in English (review)

printed primary texts and secondary sources cited, as well as a full general index. This is a book that all students of medieval Latin intellectual and educational culture and English literary culture in the later medieval period must own. It is a model of its kind. John O. Ward Department of History University of Sydney The Cambridge guide to literature in English, ed. Ian Ousby, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. 1055, numerous illustrations; R R P AU$59.95. This handsomely produced volume is a second edition of the 1988 successor to Stapleton's The Cambridge guide to English literature. English literature has here become literature in English. This is what most distinguishes the book from its rivals: it offers an encyclopaedic guide to the Englishspeaking world of writing. Its nature is not only geographically diverse. 125 contributors provide alphabetical entries on literary groups, critical schools or movements, critical concepts, literary magazines and theatres, as well on the expected authors, works and genres. Though there are no suggestions for further reading, as in Margaret Drabble's Oxford companion, a system of cross-referencing urges on the inquiring reader, and there are many illustrations, mostiy photographs of writers, to amuse them on the way. It is a book for a visual age. This edition has a new preface, Doris Lessing's replacing Margaret Atwood's, and claims to be 'substantially enlarged and updated'. Issuing a second edition only five years after thefirstpoints to another distinctive feature of this Guide; it is, or was, up to date. Author entries list books published in 1992. In comparison, the Oxford companion which has stayed with 'English', that is British, writers, includes only those bom before 1939. Claude Rawson, reviewing the 1988 edition in the TLS, grumbled that 'Stapleton's ebullient vacuities' were 'replaced by an often inelegant terseness'. Yet he still concluded that the new Guide could 'hardly help being an improvement on the old'. Yes and no. One must acknowledge, with Rawson, the correction of old errors, and be grateful for the breadth of information in this easy-to-use book. Nevertheless, there is a colourlessness about a conglomeration of entries by quite so many authors. Inevitably not 280 Reviews all can manage the desired crisp style. The entries range, as an earlier review put it, from the 'comprehensive, acute and succinct to [the] mechanical, jejune and flabby'. Then, with contributors being listed but their contributions not identified, a disconcerting anonymity lies over the varied entries. Readers familiar with earlier guides might look back to a time when compiling a book of this kind was a possible, if Herculean, task one person might tackle. The result might delight or annoy but at least the book had a voice, an identity. Here the prevailing tone is not personal, let alone judgmental, but anxious, perhaps to acquire market share, certainly to avoid offence. Ian Ousby, who has done the lion's share of the work, is not even allowed to speak his own foreword; that place is ceded to a very carefully chosen 'star': a non-British woman writer, Doris Lessing. Lessing uses her single page to defend two ideas: that 'people' can detect literary excellence, the chief pleasure in reading, and that literature offers readers a form of knowledge of life. Lessing may know to w h o m she is talking, but it is not easy to say to w h o m the book is addressed. Drabble acknowledged in her 'Preface' the 'increasing specialisation and professionalism of English studies'. Professional specialists write the entries, but, she claims, their aim is to 'satisfy the immediate curiosity of the common reader'. The immensely greater scope of this Guide makes it virtually impossible to imagine its 'ordinary everyday reader'. Thousands of very different readers will use this encyclopaedic book, leaving huge sections of it untouched. Readers of this journal are more likely to consult the volume's entries on Drewe, Robert or Drum than on The dream ofthe rood or 'dream-vision'. This is fortunate since the medieval and Renaissance entries are not its strength. The Guide's up-to-dateness does not extend to new ways of looking at the past. W...