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THIS volume is an updating of the Fifth Edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature which was first published in 1985, and reprinted several times with corrections and revisions. It incorporates much of the material from the 1985 edition, but there have been very substantial additions and some deletions, and some different guidelines have been introduced. The most significant of these is the decision not to maintain the principle of an age barrier. In the previous volume, no writers born after 1939 were included. In this one, we have not had recourse to a cut-off birth date. It seemed important at this stage to try to be inclusive rather than exclusive. Inevitably the names of younger writers will prove more controversial, but I hope the selection here, which aims to be illustrative rather than encyclopaedic, will give a broad sense of what was being written at the turn of the millennium. I have been much helped here by younger advisers, who see a different map of literature from the one with which my generation is familiar. But I hope the solid outline of the old one remains clearly visible.
We have maintained the practice of using unsigned entries, though advisers and contributors are acknowledged on page ix. We have also stood by the principle of including foreign authors, most of whom have been treated not as they might have been in their own countries, but in the context of English literature, and I mean English literature, not literature in English, which is another matter altogether. The inclusion of foreign-language authors, as well as postcolonial and American writers in English, has made for some very difficult decisions. It would have been simpler and easier to exclude them all, but the resulting volume would, I believe, have been far less useful and less interesting.
This book remains a companion for the general reader, although it will also, I hope, be of use to the student, the scholar, and the journalist. There are fewer 'general knowledge' entries, but we have more entries on critical theory, all expressed in plain language and accessible to the non-specialist. Other growth areas of subject matter are also very striking. We have, notably, more women writers and more post-colonial writers, though inevitably we will not have included enough to satisfy experts in these fields. Space has been saved by compressing some of the entries on artists and musicians, who were very generously represented in the last edition, and by a judicious and tactful pruning of the entries for the many works of Sir Walter Scott. We have kept many but not all of the character references, and have reduced the number of cross-references. There are no hard and fast rules for finding characters: common sense is the guide, and thus Zuleika Dobson and Zeal-of-the-land Busy still appear under Z (always an underrepresented letter of the alphabet), where I guess most would expect to find them. But if you do not find your character (or your title) where you first seek for it, please try again under the most obvious alternative. We cannot cover all possibilities, and consistency, although admirable, can also be misleading.
Margaret Drabble