Guides to terms have traditionally focused on literary forms (like poems and novels) and stylistic features (like sonnets and epistolary novels and metaphors), with some grammatical and linguistic features thrown in. This relative narrow compass has radically changed and now incorporates a wide range of philosophical and ideological, psychological and historical, cultural and racial and gender-based ideas. Students at school, college and university levels need all this critical apparatus to understand and interpret the literary and cultural material presented to them in the classroom, in personal investigation and in their general response to their environment.
Mary Klages offered an attractive and popular introduction to this frame of reference in her 2006 guide Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed (Klages, 2006), following it up with her Key Terms in Literary Theory (Klages, 2011). This Complete Guide is an amalgamation of the two earlier works, with expanded and updated material (on such topics as deconstruction and post colonialism), updated reading, some new citation of key texts, further advice to teachers for classroom use and a consolidated index. Her keynote theme of humanism (in the sense that literary theory helps us understand literary and cultural experiences as human beings, and not, say, the rejection of religious belief) appears in the introduction, and pervades the material in a generalized sense after that.
This is a useful and realistically priced item for the student at (above all) college and first-/second-year university levels, and will hold its own against numerous competitors (above all in the area of philosophical ideas and where, as in postmodernism, there is a wealth of print and online information) for at least three years of shelf life. The paperback comes in a durable format, and the availability of ePub and PDF variants will make it more accessible to library users. As well as the wider frame of reference referred to earlier, two things strike the reader with this book. The first is, for all the familiarity of most of the ideas and material, they have been selected and packaged conveniently for the intended readers (mainly students and their tutors and teachers), making the discussions transparently relevant. These discussions are also helpfully presented in an unpretentious and clear manner, and this is not always the case with reference works dealing with continental philosophical and cultural theory.
The second is that a successful attempt has been made to guide students in what class discussions might offer them, how themes might be followed-up in personal research; and beyond that, how tutors and teachers might develop and incorporate ideas and research inquiries into their teaching programmes. With this last in mind, guidance is provided time and time again on what can be introduced to students in classroom situations – for instance, using psychoanalytical theory from Freud and Lacan in the study of Hamlet, or what Hélène Cixous does in her own criticism in analysing Shakespeare’s texts. This regularly occurs in a set of thematic essays that begin the complete guide (and which formed the substance of the original guide “for the perplexed”): structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminist theories, queer theories, ideology and discourse, race and post colonialism, ecocriticism and post-modernism.
Each one of these discusses selects figures from that wide range of cultural reference those who have shaped literary theory (and the study of literature and its cultural satellites like media texts) in distinctive ways – Saussure and Propp from structuralism, for instance, Derrida from deconstruction, Althusser and Bakhtin from ideological discourse and Lugones and Morrison and Gates from race and post-colonialism. Queer theory has Butler and Rubin and Irigaray, Foucault rightly appears everywhere. A 30-page section of biographies points to a wealth of further reading and complements references to figures mentioned in the essays.
The section on Terms (about 100 pages, and originating in Klages’s original work Key Terms from 2011) reinforces the discussions in the essays (mercifully not confusing them) – for example, deconstruction and postmodernity and sign and interpellation, all get full and clear entries – and complements the essays and the biographies, and all these are supported by a helpful index. Navigating this work should prove no problem to a busy and sometimes perplexed student (and teachers who always wonder whether, with material like this, they have judged the level of explanation correctly as they rush through the syllabus). The complete guide comes out quite well, then, although more work could be done on ecocriticism – a new feature –sadly not at the same helpfulness level as the rest. A useful addition, but, to be plain, not one to buy in hardback unless the trade-off between durability and obsolescence can be resolved easily by the reference librarian.
