The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English

The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English provides, in a single volume, the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of literature in English available today. Substantially enlarged and updated for this new edition, it covers all the major novelists, poets, and dramatists of the classical canon and of contemporary literature, from Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, and Conrad to Saul Bellow, Adrienne Rich, Les Murray, Wole Soyinka, R.K. Narayan, Janet Frame, Mordecai Richler, Joseph Brodsky, and John Coetzee. Unique among literature guides, this volume provides extensive, multicultural coverage of all literature written in English, including Indian, Caribbean, Australian, African, Canadian, and Irish, as well as British and American. More than one hundred specialist contributors provide biographical and critical articles on writers and their works, critics, philosophers, historians, and biographers. Substantial coverage is also given to such literary genres as popular fiction, science fiction, detective novels and children's classics. Literary concepts such as structuralism, tragedy, and irony are described, and full explanations are provided for movements from neoclassicism to postmodernism. Hailed in its first edition as "indispensable" and "path-breaking" (Los Angeles Times), and for having "immense browsability" (Anthony Burgess) and "breadth of vision" (The Guardian), this new edition of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is the definitive handbook to the vast, diverse, and extraordinarily rich heritage of English literature.