Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary: A Compendium to More Than 500 Literary, Critical, and Theatrical Movements, Schools, and Groups from ... (Literary Movements Reference Series) - Hardcover
Synopsis
Provides a guide to analyzing literature from the perspective of literary movements, with more than five hundred literary, theatrical, and critical campaigns, schools, and groups examined.
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Reviews
A preface that reprints ReneWellek's serious academic study "Periods and Movements in Literary History" sets the tone for this volume providing entries on more than 500 of twentieth-century world-literature's movements and schools. Also covered are the novelists, poets, dramatists, short story writers, theorists, essayists, genres, techniques, and terms identified with these movements.
The editors drew on an advisory board representing public, school, and university libraries. Entries were prepared using standard reference sources, such as various Oxford companions to literature. The work is arranged alphabetically, beginning with the Abbaye Group of France and concluding with the Russian Znanie Group. Both are turn-of-the-century groups that formed homes for intellectuals such as Georges Duhamel (Abbaye) and Maxim Gorky (Znanie). These entries are no more than 250 words long, reflecting their relative importance. Other entries, such as Expressionism, lost generation (referring to American writers in France in the 1920s), and Realism are considerably longer and have multiple subentries. Lost generation, for example, includes sections on Djuna Barnes, e. e. cummings, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others; each author entry has a subsection that briefly treats one representative work. Realism includes a time line, followed by a country-by-country survey. Because realism was primarily a nineteenth-century movement, a number of influential nineteenth-century authors, such as Charles Dickens and Ivan Turgenev, are considered here. All entries are clearly and concisely written.
A list of further reading follows each entry. Four appendixes complete the volume: a time line of literary movements, a chronology by country, a list of journals cited, and an extensive list of Web sites. There are also four indexes, making the dictionary arrangement with its multiple subentries much more accessible: a movements index, an author index, a title index, and a country and nationality index.
Though the bulk of the volume deals with literature of Europe and the U.S., this is a highly useful volume if only because of the international focus that has been sorely lacking in other works. In spite of the density of the preface, the target audience is defined as the late high-school and early college student; but the book would be a useful resource for any student of twentieth-century literature. Undergraduate college libraries, especially, would be remiss not to have it in the reference collections.
This outstanding reference defines more than 500 literary movements, schools, writers, works, and theories from 80-plus countries. Covering an extraordinary array of movements, from the well known (naturalism) to the esoteric (Quadriga, a Polish poetry movement), the dictionary incorporates an almost heady mix of novelists, poets, dramatists, theorists, and essayists. Arranged alphabetically, the entries are augmented with a timeline of movements, a chronology by country, a list of relevant web sites, and indexes of movements, authors, titles, and countries. Some entries on major movements span dozens of pages and include key authors and works that illustrate primary elements of a movement or school. A notable contribution to the field, this is broader than older similar works, which tend to focus on only one language, country, or school. This one-stop reference to the literary movements of the 20th century is an excellent tool. Highly recommend for all libraries.
-Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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