The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English

by Ian Ousby (Editor)

Substantially enlarged and updated for this new edition, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is the definitive guide to the vast and extraordinarily rich heritage of literature written in English. It covers all the major novelists, poets and dramatists - from Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens to Conrad and to contemporary writers from all over the English-speaking world - Saul Bellow, Adrienne Rich, Les Murray, Wole Soyinka, and Janet Frame. More than 100 specialist contributors provide detailed biographical and critical articles not only on writers and their works. Substantial coverage is also given to such literary genres as popular fiction, science fiction, detective novels, and children's classics. All literary concepts and movements are described in detail. - Over 4,500 alphabetical entries, cross-referenced throughout - Includes all literature in English - British, Irish, American, Australian, African, Canadian, New Zealand, Indian and Caribbean - Illustrated throughout with over 115 photographs and line drawings

Genres: Reference, Nonfiction, Literature, Literary Criticism, Textbooks, Books About Books, Academic

1067 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 1988

About the author

I an Ousby's life began - and ended - in tragedy. The birth was tragic, or at least bleak, because his army officer father had been stabbed to death in the India of 1947, independence year, while his mother was pregnant with him. The death was tragic, or at least deeply sad, because his industry, insight, versatility, critical and literary skills, which had created a considerable reputation for him as a writer in diverse fields, have been cut off by cancer at the relatively early age of 54.
Ousby never seemed a very contemporary figure and eschewed fashion and fashions of all kinds. Mannered and slightly languid - but not eccentric - in speech and dress, he was an essentially shy man who was able, through the clarity of his thought and the manner of his expression, to get trenchantly to the heart of the matter, somewhat like a 19th-century essayist but without a hint of the dilettante. As writer, scholar and broadcaster, his contributions ranged through several genres: the study of detective fiction, travel, literature and modern French history among them. His readers were far flung: his book on the American novel was translated into Russian, on detectives in fiction into Japanese.
Born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, he had a reputation as a rebel at school, Bishop's Stortford College. A young and liberal headmaster was not quite liberal enough for Ousby, and he fulminated in the school magazine, of which he was editor, against the public schools as "the last institutions in which changes in national attitude, thought or social pattern are reflected". An active member of CND from his early teens, he would go on the Easter marches, and proselytised in the provinces for the newly published Private Eye.
Yet all this was misleading. Pitchforked into American student unrest at the end of the 1960s when he went to Harvard for his doctorate, he found the radicalism unpleasant and the time-wasting unacceptable. Writing from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1972, he observed: "Mercifully, political consciousness seems to have diminished, so they [the students] won't be going on strike all the time."
The author of several books on early tourism and of Blue Guides to Literary Britain and Ireland (1985), England (1989) and Burgundy (1992), he had most recently been working on a major study, The Road to Verdun: France, Nationalism and the First World War, news of which has been greeted with excited anticipation in the world of books, and which will be published early next year. As a young man Ousby had quoted Martin Luther King approvingly: "You can never get rid of a problem as long as you hide the problem." In private life, like many or most of us, he probably failed to live up to that; in his writing, he triumphantly exemplified its message.

Biography source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2001/a...

Reviews

[Rogermue · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent guide to literature in English. Handy and compact for a moderate price. Ousby gives good and understandable information about authors, important books, and terms of literature. I like it because it has sound information about a lot of things and I use it often, because the realm of literature is an ocean one never exhausts in a lifetime. I really recommend it.

[Kevin Moynihan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very useful. I’ve learned a lot flipping through these pages.