Although Avis Gachet of Wonderland Books, Granite Falls, North Carolina, is mentioned in the acknowledgements, I doubt she had anything to do with the cover design, but the book looks as if it has come from Wonderland! And not just for the strikingly bright multicoloured cover design, but also for the interior page layouts and typography. These are a class above the usual and appropriate for the subject‐matter, though when we come to content and exposition, the case is less clear.
The book is an alphabetical dictionary of terms “essential to a thorough, comprehensive study of world literature, including print literature as well as stage drama.” (Preface). Thorough and comprehensive it is not, though worldwide is truer. The majority of the terms can be found in most dictionaries of English, and probably better explained in most handbooks on the literature shelves. Terms such as ode, onomatopoeia, ottave rima, oxymoron, saga, sarcasm and satire should present no problem, even to small libraries.
The worldwide aspect, indicated by the word “multicultural” in the title, is catered for in several ways. A particular effort is made to include terms that come from outside the British, white, male, Judeo‐Christian and “straight” literature. This point is emphasised. The publishers have “added a challenging list of forms including the Japanese renga, sub‐Saharan beast lore, Sioux vision quest, Canadian folk tale, Australian saga, Mexican corrido, and African surah.” There is thus, the publishers claim, an “expanded awareness of literary possibilities.” Another ploy to help us depart the literary world of DWEMs and WASPS (dead white European males and white Anglo‐Saxon protestants) is to incorporate into the explanations references to a fresh corpus of work that illustrate the point under consideration.
Despite the promise, the new foreign imports are rather swamped by the traditional fare of European style and lit. crit. A wider focus is welcome, but the brave new world of multicultural literature has yet to lose dithyrambs, encomiums, and alexandrines: the Dead Poets’ Society lives on. In fact the dictionary is rather a disappointment. The definitions are too brief to be much more than just indicative. It needs more than the usual single example per topic to make the meaning clear. A reference to works which display the characteristic is helpful, but the authors frequently slip into the mistake of assuming that by quoting a title (most of which are unfamiliar) they have thereby explained the point. The whole work has the feel of a college textbook about it, and one at a pretty basic level too. The editors’ list of texts given as examples in the introduction sounds decidedly like a reading list. I just cannot see who would find the book useful. As an editor of a literary journal, I am frequently floored by the literary jargon used by hopeful contributors, but the 22 one‐liners listed as types of criticism for example, from absolutist criticism to textual criticism, though amusing, are far too brief.
The book is called, quite rightly, a dictionary, but there is a revealing slip in the Preface where we are told that “A casual reading of the Handbook compels the reader …”. Does “casual” reading compel? Does one read, even casually, a dictionary? Is this a handbook or a dictionary? Confusion all round. Add to the dictionary the Appendix listing winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Fiction, and Poetry, and the Booker McConnell Prize; and an Appendix in which the major publications are listed by year from Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun of 1350 bc to Barbara Kingslover’s The Poisonwood Bible of 1998, then the focus is dissipated yet further. Interestingly, the bibliography lists 15 Websites. And that worries me. Insofar as a bibliography lists the sources the author used to gain information or to support his or her point of view, that is fine. But when, as here, a bibliography is intended as (surely) a permanent guide to further reading (print‐based or other) then Websites are of doubtful value because of their volatile and transitory nature. Of ten of the Websites listed here, I found only three (good ones admittedly), a fourth was barred as a sex site, two were located but wouldn’t load, and four could not be located at all. QED! Typical Internet? The index is good though. I was not too happy with some of the definitions, over and above their brevity. A doppelgänger is defined as a motif that stresses pairing of characters. Surely it has a much more subtle meaning, something about parallel existences? And to characterise Victorianism as “the rigidly moral, priggish aspect of literature written during the reign of England’s [sic!] Queen Victoria …” is far too simplistic. Victoria reigned for 64 years; it was, as I keep telling my eager suppliants, most of them American, only after the Prince Consort’s death that the term truly applies.
Despite willing this attractively produced volume to succeed, the definitions lack depth and the striving for a New Age of Multiculturalism is too contrived. Fine for the multicultural literature curriculum of a North American college library.
