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When the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature appeared, The New York Times Book Review, in a front-page review, hailed it as "a wonderful, infuriating, amusing, and informative war horse of a book" and "a source of real delight," adding "No wonder the book is, as Miss Drabble says, 'much loved'." Now, Margaret Drabble has updated the fifth edition, adding sixty completely new entries and revising the entries on contemporary writers.
Readers will find many new faces here. Drabble has introduced dozens of contemporary novelists, poets, and other literary figures, including Martin Amis, Wendy Cope, Salman Rushdie, David Hare, P.D. James, Paul Theroux, A.N. Wilson, Anita Brookner, J.M. Coetzee, Robertson Davies, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Toni Morrison, and Gore Vidal. There are also new appendices listing winners of major literary prizes--including the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Booker Prize--and a full chronology spanning nearly a thousand years of English literature, from Beowulf to the present day. Of course, the Companion continues to offer unmatched coverage of English literature, from its classical roots (with entries on Homer, Plato, Virgil, and Catullus) to its European influences (from Rabelais and Goethe to Cervantes, Schiller, and Baudelaire). The curious will find information on fictional characters, the plots of major works, literary and artistic movements, critical terms and theory, and much more.
Comprehensive, authoritative, and up to date, this revised edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature offers the most complete reference guide to our marvelous literary heritage. [via]