The short Oxford history of English literature /

An era of specialization (if that is what the present really is) should perhaps be grateful for works of synthesis, but it is difficult to know just what audience and purpose a new "shorter history" of English literature from the Middle Ages to Postmodernism can serve. In what is perhaps the most interesting section of this book, a brief introduction on "canon-formation," Sanders examines the way previous histories and canons have exemplified various moral, nationalistic, and other ideologies, and explains that he hopes to avoid all these loaded ways of limiting his subject. However, the result of this desire to grind no axes is a book with no organizing themes at all. After brief excurses into "background" and amidst loosely grouped characterizations of major authors and works (rarely genres), chapters reproduce familiar periodizations and recapitulate long-questioned narratives of local change (such as the transition from "neoclassic" to "romantic"). The book provides neither readable story lines nor an authoritative, easily consulted reference source; its main use may be as monument to a rudderless time in English letters. General; undergraduate. D. L. Patey; Smith College

Designed to replace Emile Legouis's A Short History of English Literature (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1934), Sanders's work competes with one-volume histories by Pat Rogers (The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, Oxford Univ. Pr., 1987), Alastair Fowler (A History of English Literature, LJ 3/1/88), and Peter Quennell (A History of English Literature, LJ 1/1/74. o.p.). Sanders includes more information than Fowler but lacks the advantage of the photographs, art work, and maps found in Rogers and Quennell. He skillfully introduces controversies about the development of an English literature canon and explains how writers got selected for burial in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, arguing that English literature has always been rife with contradiction, ``both multiple and polarized, both popular and elite.'' His book has ten major chapters covering Old English, medieval, Renaissance, Shakespearean, 17th- and 18th-century, Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and postwar literature. Innovative essays include ``Women's Writing in the Restoration'' and ``The New Morality,'' which examines the 1970s and 1980s. Recommended for academic and most public libraries.-J. Thorndike, Lakeland Coll., Sheboygan, Wis. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.