As the millennium turned, the great historic map of English literature began to be redrawn. Over last year, bookshop polls, radio surveys, newspaper round-ups and literary guides looked again at the writing of the century, the history of the tradition, and at the “modern century”, as its literature slipped from being contemporary to being historical. Meanwhile notions of the tradition were shifting. The canon — the sequence of interlinked works that make for our sense of a significant, continuous national tradition — was under challenge from feminists and post-colonialists, pluralists and relativists, from the deconstructive pressure of literary theory, and the global cyber-revolution that has altered the status of writer, reader and book.
There are those who doubt that there is a tradition, or a distinctive entity called literature, and those who denounce the idea of “English” literature as a chauvinist concept. For all that the book is back, there is fascination with the classic and a hunger for history; and no time has been more engaged with versions of story and narrative.
Hence this is a time to amend the classic literary guidebooks, and to create new ones for the changing climate. And no guide could come more classic than The Oxford Companion to English Literature (OCEL), the literary reference source of first resort. The history of the famously indispensible volume is itself a lesson in modern views of literature. Created in 1932 by Sir Paul Harvey, the original OCEL was encyclopaedic yet engaging, academic yet wonderfully arcane. It assumed a cultivated reader, a classical education, a fascination with allusion. It set side by side the truly great and amazingly minor. Amid the radical rages of Modernism it suggested the security of the tradition.
By 1985, when Margaret Drabble assumed the editorship, surgery was needed. The hypothetical reader had faded, the avant garde been and gone, the tradition shifted. Doors were opened to writers born after 1939, so the Modern movement and much postwar writing could assume key places. The network of classical and biblical allusion was thinned.
Now the sixth edition has risen to even larger challenges. As Margaret Drabble, still editor, notes in her preface, the roles of reference books and their users have changed, along with the cultural climate and the range of our writing. She has responded with a large updating, adding 600 entries. All age limits on writers have gone, and the new creativity of the last 20 years is eclectically (you could even say permissively) on display.
Feminism has changed the gender balance. Contemporary international writing is excellently covered, and the arts in general. New literary and critical tendencies — Modernism, Structuralism — are given strong, accessible, often clearly highlit entries of high intellectual quality. Here is Rap and Richard Rorty, Post-Colonialism and Black British Fiction, Mike Leigh and OuLiPo, the Aga Saga, Interactive Fiction and World Wide Web. There are strong entries on generic writing — science fiction, spy and detective fiction. There is even a teasing fictitious entry (now revealed as Pycletius, Spanish geographer and early magic realist).
Some of the old apparatus has gone — the history of the Calendar, the list of feastdays — replaced by an excellent chronology of Eng. Lit. and lists of Nobels, Pulitzers, Bookers from our prize-awarding age. The Harvey ghost has not left entirely; innumerable touches of his taste and charm survive, as in the entry on “Philistine” (“persons regarded as ‘the enemy’ into whose hands one may fall, bailiffs, literary critics, etc.”).
Like Harvey before her, Drabble has her editorial quirks. Waterstone’s is in but not Dillon’s. Many of the entries are stylishly her own. The whole achievement owes much to her wide literary openness and insight, and she emerges as one of the great modern (postmodern?) editors.
A similar openness is there in Pure Pleasure by John Carey, one of our best and most accessible critics. This slim book reprinting his series of Sunday Times articles “Books of the Century” offers just what it says on the cover. This is a series of short essays not on the best books of the 20th century, but the most enjoyable.
Many of us who took part in last year’s 20th-century retrospects found ourselves returning to works we had not visited for some time. Doing the same, Carey has insisted on the pleasure principle, revisiting no “thumping masterpieces” but books, often by the great writers, that give the most joy.
The enjoyment spills over. Carey turns our attention to Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Gorki’s My Childhood, the verse of Edward Thomas, Keith Douglas and Stevie Smith. He takes in Hasek (The Good Soldier Svejk), Ishiguro (The Unconsoled), Swift (Last Orders), and sends us back to Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Graves.
All are treated in splendid short essays, a prompt to reading, as good criticism ought to be. Carey explains that one prompt to his enterprise was the news that literature would play no part in the Millennium Dome; if the Blairite world is bookless, it was time to make the alternative case. Both books do that. They show us we have a major literature, past and present, international, rich, and in vigorous change; and that it rests on a tradition we may often amend but would be foolish to reject.
