Scholars seeking to refresh their knowledge of a once-familiar topic and students in the process of beginning a new study will find the “just over five hundred substantial articles” of this five-volume set comprehensive, accessible, and engaging (1:xi). Organized alphabetically from “Abbey Theatre” to “Benjamin Zephaniah,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature offers a truly modern, challengingly diverse series of commentaries on how literature and our public understanding of it have evolved from the Old English poet Caedmon to the twenty-first century's international publishing phenomenon J. K Rowling. While the editor-in-chief, David Scott Kastan, acknowledges the problematic nature of both key terms in this work's title—“British” because it necessarily mutes distinct regional and national contexts, and “Literature” because the term admits so many competing definitions—the juxtaposition of the creatively chosen topics and the diverse outlooks of the contributors vastly expand our understanding of what those words can reasonably encompass. As Kastan points out, “Literature does not need a passport or respect a border” (1:xii). A sampling of almost any of the essays included in these volumes bears that out. British literature, broadly and imaginatively defined, has never been so well served in an entry point reference work.

The articles were written by both established and emerging scholars and cover a satisfyingly eclectic range of works, genres, writers, critics, schools and movements, institutions, and other relevant topics that illuminate literature in some way. The string of subjects beginning with the letter e, from volume 2, illustrates this breadth: Maria Edgeworth, eighteenth-century journalism, elegy, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Queen Elizabeth I, emblem books, William Empson, epistolary novel, Olaudah Equiano, John Evelyn, Everyman, Exeter Book. As further evidence of the imaginative construction of the concepts “British” and “Literature,” the same volume includes articles on the Beatles, Black British literature, closet drama, J. M. Coetzee, copyright, dictionaries, Margaret Drabble, Daphne du Maurier, Michael Field, Ian Fleming, Sigmund Freud, Gretna Green novels, Grub Street, and Harley Lyrics, along with entries concerning the expected names and categories.

The encyclopedia is designed to be easy to use in every sense. Volume 1 opens with a “List of Articles” for the set, a preface, and a chronology that places the topics in historical context. Volume 5 has a “Directory of Contributors” and the index for the set. The only missing piece of apparatus is a table of contents for each volume; the alphabetical arrangement makes articles easy to find, but surveying the contents of the volume in hand is sometimes desirable. The books are about the height and width of a standard piece of notebook paper and remarkably lightweight; they are comfortable to hold and leaf through, unlike many such tomes. Unfortunately, the encyclopedia is sparsely illustrated, with small portraits or photographs of some authors from the National Portrait Gallery; while a fully illustrated work would no doubt have been even more expensive, it seems a shame to pass over so much of literature's visual record. Even so, when the price of the encyclopedia comes down (a new set was being sold online for $299.99 at the time of this writing), serious students of British literature will want to have their own copy for easy reference.

Each topic is developed in an essay of two pages or more, followed by commentary on significant editions for some authors, a list of selected works, and a list of further reading chosen, in most cases, from among both the classic and more recent works of criticism on the subject, with each citation followed by a one-sentence summary. The entry for D. H. Lawrence, by David Seelow, for example, cites F. R. Leavis's D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London, 1955) and Amit Chaudhuri's D. H. Lawrence and “Difference”: Post-coloniality and the Poetry of the Present (Oxford, 2003). The editors might have applied more rigor in requiring good representation of contemporary criticism in some of the longer lists of further reading. The article on Charles Dickens, by John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff, includes only one critical work published after 1988, for example. “William Shakespeare: The Comedies,” by John D. Cox, lists one article from the 1990s (1991, to be exact), nothing later, in a list of twenty-four works of criticism. For the most part, however, the lists of further reading are productive starting points for more in-depth examination of the subject.

The article “Romanticism,” by David Simpson, demonstrates some of the best qualities of the encyclopedia, offering a real twenty-first-century evaluation of literature that was once defined by narrow dates—1790–1830—and an even narrower range of writers and genres. Simpson gives credence to what he calls “the old Romanticism”: “What really held the five traditionally major male poets [William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley] together in such a long-lasting model of the canon of Romanticism was both their maleness and their openness to sophisticated psychological and theoretical investigations of the nature of human subjectivity itself” (4:403). According to Simpson, the “new” Romanticism includes women, novels, drama, diaries, treatises and tracts, developments in history and science, and a whole range of subject matter beyond that of the lyrical poetry that formed the original Romantic canon. As Simpson points out, today writers such as Jane Austen and Mary Shelley are no longer seen as interesting outliers but as creators of works integral to an understanding of what Romanticism was and would become. A separate article, “Romantic Drama,” by Michael Garner, demonstrates the editors’ commitment to a broadened understanding of Romanticism. The new Romanticism reaches beyond a narrow historical era, transcending what was once thought to be its chiefly local interests to represent an authentically international perspective. While recognizing that modern scholarship has reexamined all literary periods with an “enlivened sense of the importance of class, gender, and empire,” Simpson claims “historicism and self-consciousness” as a chief contribution of Romanticism, with its writers and theorists so “acutely conscious of the paradoxes of interpretation and description as issues in themselves” (405). The status of Romanticism as a founding movement of modern thought is enhanced by this enlightened approach.

Editors must always make choices, and in a work of such purported comprehensiveness, every reader will have her own set of authors and topics that she thinks ought to have been included. For example, there is an enthusiastic and thoughtful article by David Damrosch on P. G. Wodehouse and his contribution to the modern comic novel, but the encyclopedia does not make even passing reference to—much less include entries for—Wodehouse's contemporaries E. F. Benson or E. M. Delafield. To give space to contemporary novelist Edna O’Brien and omit her predecessor Kate O’Brien leaves a hole in the history of the modern Irish novel. These are quibbles. A great deal of material is covered here that has never been written about in such a context before. The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature—all apologies to those for whom the key terms remain contentious—is a remarkable move forward for literary studies and will be a valuable addition to school, college, and individual libraries.