Oxford Companion to English

The Oxford Companion to English Literature has, since it first appeared in 1932, proved hugely popular, becoming not just a staple of library reference sections, but also a valuable tool for academics and amateurs, as well as an example of the unexpected readability of works of reference – those books that threaten to be ossuaries, yet abound with glistening treasure. It was the first in the Oxford Companions series; now that series is vast, encompassing titles such as the Oxford Companion to Global Change and the Oxford Companion to Black British History.

For its seventh edition, the editorship has passed from Margaret Drabble to Dinah Birch, who in her preface characterizes the volume as “a lively and authoritative source of reference for general readers, scholars, students, and journalists looking for a guide to English literature in its broadest context”. “Much . . . is fresh”, she writes, and so it is. There are more than 1,000 new entries, the cross-referencing has been strengthened, and there is more coverage of literature produced outside the British Isles.

There are also substantial new introductory essays. In the first of these Hermione Lee addresses “Literary culture and the novel in the new millennium”, reflecting on the ramifications of online bookselling, the “DIY reviewing culture” of blogs, the role of literary prizes and the recent proliferation of populist defences of fiction by critics such as James Wood, Jane Smiley and John Mullan. The theme is certainly not “O tempora o mores”, but at the heart of the essay is a sensitive awareness of the changing contours of literariness and the new mechanisms of literature’s dissemination and reception. While Lee’s essay and the others by Kelvin Everest, Bénédicte Ledent and Michael Rosen are instructive, they are essentially amuse-bouches. The meat of the book is the 1,100 pages of alphabetically sequenced articles that follow. These are supplemented by appendices providing among other things a literary chronology and lists of major awards.

The articles, lucid and resolutely factual, are flecked with personal touches. Here are Milton (who died “probably of renal failure associated with gout”), Tennyson (whose work “continues to suggest excellent new readings in its emotional, political, formal, and linguistic aspects”) and Auden (in whose writings “the urbane, the pastoral, the lyrical, the erudite, the public, and the introspective mingle with great fluency”). Here, too, are thematic items on parody, where we drop in on both Henry Fielding and Wendy Cope, and diaries, from Pepys to Bridget Jones via Francis Kilvert and James Lees-Milne. There are brief explanations of matters such as tail-rhyme and chiasmus, and intelligently succinct ones dealing with, for instance, the Bush Theatre, madrigals, Harriet Tubman, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and The Times Literary Supplement. This last “tries to cover most of the important works of literature and scholarship, and remains influential”.

Who and what is fresh in Dinah Birch’s edition? Perusing the Hs, one finds for the first time Mark Haddon, whose novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is “a remarkable tour de force”; hagiography, a term “often now used to condemn uncritical biography”; the Harlem Renaissance; Ben Hecht; His Dark Materials, which, we are ambiguously told, “has attracted many enthusiastic readers”; Alfred Hitchcock, whose entry mentions only four of his films by name (The Lodger, Blackmail, Rebecca and Vertigo); Khaled Hosseini; Michel Houellebecq; and the “virtually unreadable” Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

Elsewhere there are many good new entries, as for instance on J. H. Prynne – “a poet whose desire for personal obscurity is often confounded with a perceived desire for poetic obscurity” – and the eighteenth-century devotional writer William Law, who in his fifties retired to Northamptonshire “to live a life of charity, celibacy, prayer, reading, and writing”. Even the short entries contain nicely condensed insights. Neil Gaiman manifests “an erudite sensitivity to the dark undercurrents of folklore”; Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis is “much more than the suicide note its title suggests”; and Sam Selvon’s fiction relates “the experiences of black immigrants trying to find fame and fortune, or at least a bed, in the unknown terrain of Earls Court, Notting Hill, and Bayswater”. Elegance, concision and a crisp informativeness are the norm.

Moreover, there has been significant revision. Among the senior authors to have been given more than just a polish are Chaucer, Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. In some cases the coverage is admirably up to date – Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall is noted – but, conversely, one finds that the entry on Geoff Dyer mentions no book of his more recent than Paris Trance (1998).

A small number of entries are unsatisfactory. “Gonzo journalism” reads: “A phrase coined in 1970 about the work of Hunter S. Thompson and subsequently applied to writing which combines fact and fiction, often in a flamboyant way”. The definition is vague; it would be a help to know that the gonzo form is subjective and openly suspicious of the idea that journalism can be objective, and perhaps also to know that the term was coined by Bill Cardoso. The entry on the “hardboiled” style of crime fiction provides the name of only one of its practitioners, Dashiell Hammett, and does not mention that it was pioneered by Carroll John Daly. Brevity can contract into perfunctoriness.

There are issues of emphasis, too. For instance, the entry on The Prisoner of Zenda is longer than those on Truman Capote and Melodrama. Why, we may wonder, does Mike Leigh get as much coverage as Philip Roth, whom Hermione Lee in her introductory essay identifies as “the greatest living American writer”? Why is there as much on Les Murray as on Philip Larkin, and less on F. Scott Fitzgerald than on J. K. Rowling (or Thomas Lodge, or The Pickwick Papers)?

Furthermore, there are omissions – or at least what feel like omissions. In dealing with “writers with newly established reputations”, the Companion “can make no claim to comprehensive coverage”. But what about writers whose reputations are not newly established? There are no entries for Robert Lowth, Richard Carew, August Wilson, John Muir, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elspeth Huxley and David Foster Wallace. Among living authors, none of Tim Parks, Clive James, Alexander McCall Smith and John McPhee makes the cut. They might with some justification be miffed at apparently being less important than Ben Elton (though he is described – a touch improbably – as a big influence on “many young novelists”) and Stephen Gallagher, author of two series of Doctor Who in the 1980s. There is palpable overcompensation for the previous neglect of science fiction. The overview of this genre states that Greg Bear’s novel of 1985, Blood Music, “is all that science fiction should be: its narrative makes us see the world anew”. The tribute feels incongruously partisan.

Readers unfamiliar with previous editions will be surprised by how much there is about authors writing in languages other than English. They are here chiefly because of the influence they have exerted. However, among more recent names the rationale for inclusion is not clear. There are entries on Michel Butor and Patrick Chamoiseau, yet not on Ismail Kadare, Orhan Pamuk or Haruki Murakami – and on Luigi Meneghello, yet not on Witold Gombrowicz, Roberto Bolaño or José Maria de Eça de Queiroz. On the other hand, those familiar with Drabble’s Companion may note the trimming of some of its jauntier moments, such as the statement in the section on “horror” that “for every King there are a dozen or more knaves hacking away”.

In reviewing a work of this kind there is a temptation to overemphasize mistakes. Copy-editing glitches are inevitable and there are misprints, but I found too few to justify comment. In reality, this is a scrupulously produced, smartly laid-out, academically serious and at the same time relishably browsable book, replete with valuable information. It also contains some unexpected gems. I did not know that W. H. Smith and Son opened their first railway station bookstall at Euston in 1848, that the Left Book Club in its twelve-year history printed only one play, or that P. G. Wodehouse and Jack London were among the authors published by Mills and Boon in that company’s early days. Nor did I know that it was at the Savile Club that Robert Louis Stevenson was supposed to have said that “to play billiards well was the sign of an ill-spent youth”; nor indeed that he said it to Herbert Spencer. Excellence is in the details.



Dinah Birch, editor
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE




Henry Hitchings’s recent books include The Secret Life of Words: How English became English, which appeared earlier this year.