“Literary studies”, says the preface, “have come to be dominated by approaches that emphasize the social, historical, and political significance of literary works”. I am not sure I entirely agree, but I suppose it depends what is meant by “literary studies” – it is not the study of literature, that is for sure, although much of literature will have elements of social, historical and political comment in them, even if unconscious. Every piece of writing makes some sort of a statement, not least this review! Nonetheless, a number of authors do make strong political points; many an author has been persecuted for his or her work and many a government has feared the power of the pen. One might also fault the Editor and his 12‐strong panel for concentrating on the twentieth century. Surely writing has always had a political dimension? Plato? Seneca? Defoe? Voltaire? Yet there is an awful lot of literature about and I can hardly blame the panel for making their task more manageable: it still takes them three volumes as it is. An English language focus is acknowledged, though European authors and movements are well represented, e.g. Brecht, Gogol, Derrida, Soviet Writers' Congress (1934).
The prefatory material includes a straight alphabetical listing of entries that is usefully repeated in each of the three volumes, and a categorical list of entries that gives a broad subject approach. From the latter we can get a clearer picture of the scope of this encyclopedia. A total of 265 authors from Peter Abrahams, Chinua Achebe and Anna Akhmatova, to Evgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin and Émile Zola, receive their own entries. Then there are 55 entries for critics and theorists; 29 for historical events, groups, and movements; six for historical figures (viz Emma Goldman, George Padmore, Lenin, Mao, Nkrumah and Stalin); 54 for journals and nonfiction works; 46 for literary works; the same number for national and regional literature; 30 for periods, genres, and literary movements; nine for theoretical and critical concepts; and 19 for theoretical and critical movements and approaches.
The main body of the encyclopedia features 524 entries. Page layouts are excellent and entries are typically a page in length, though some, such as the broader topics covering national literatures and genres, are longer. The prose is nicely pitched and there are clear cross‐references to topics mentioned that have their own entries. In the entry for the Beat Movement (1944‐1960), for example, there are references to Cold War, the Second World War, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Denise Levertov and Stalin. Other names, which do not have their own dictionary entries, Kerouac and Burroughs for example, are picked up in the encyclopedia's extensive index. A selected bibliography concludes each entry.
A massive 88‐page bibliography follows the main A‐Z sequence. Excellent though this is, it does seem to repeat the entries in the individual article bibliographies and I wonder whether this is an unnecessary extravagance. There is no question, though, about the marvellous 45 pages of double‐columned index. Here I can find all my favourites who were not endowed with their own entries – the Brontë sisters, J.G. Ballard, J.B. Priestley, J.L. Borges, and Stanislaw Lem. Are they not “political” enough? Particularly noteworthy in the index is the absence of “number blocks”, thus all 27 mentions under Spanish Civil War are given their individual descriptors, with any main entries indicated in bold typeface. Finally, there are notes on the 200‐plus contributors, mostly US academics.
Being critical, there is rather too much “name‐dropping”, giving a rather undergraduate “listomania” feel to some of the entries. “Dystopian fiction” is obviously a vogue phrase that I saw too often, not knowing what it meant! But overall, I found the work well suited to its subject with much illuminating and apposite material. Black Art Movement, Bildungsromen, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Anticommunism (with a reference from McCarthyism), Love on the Dole, New Criticism and Culture Wars are a small sample of the contents. Academic libraries serving literature and politics course should find this work well used, though more general libraries may prefer to stay with the standard literature and biographical sources.
