Oxford Chronology of English Literature

From School Library Journal
Grade 10 Up-This selective "digest of the printed record of English literature" updates and expands on the Annals of English Literature, 1475-1950 (Oxford, 1961; o.p.). The Chronology includes both male and female writers as well as Irish, Scottish, and Welsh authors who wrote in English. More than 30,000 works from over 4000 authors are included. Entries include the author's birth and death dates if known, pseudonyms, titles, coauthors, and type of work. Volume one gives a year-by-year list of "significant and representative works" by British authors beginning in 1474 and ending in 2000. Volume two includes separate author and title indexes. For anyone who wants to find out when a work was published, which authors wrote during certain years, and who else published during the same time period, the Chronology will provide quick answers. Also available on CD-ROM, this authoritative reference work will be a useful resource for teachers, librarians, and students.Pat Bender, The Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, PACopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Cox, an editor at Oxford and an authority on Victorian supernatural fiction, has compiled an impressive directory of English printed works from 1474 to 2000 and, in doing so, has updated the Annals of English Literature, which only went up to 1950. Mostly, he succeeds in his purpose-to provide a sampling of works published in a given year and offer a glimpse into intellectual and literary currents at a particular time in British history. The variety of works is intriguing: for the year 1588, for example, Cox includes not only expected publications, such as Thomas Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, but also delightful surprises like Timothy Bright's Characterie, the first manual of shorthand in English. Cox also features representative texts by women and working-class authors. Although quite user-friendly, with clear explanations of the format, this manual has some limitations. Cox defines English literature as works by "British authors published in Britain and authors of the colonial period who published principally with British publishing houses." Therefore, colonial poet Anne Bradstreet makes the cut because her work was initially published in Britain, but Benjamin Franklin does not despite his having been an internationally known scientist well before the American Revolution. Also, it is a little peculiar that Irish author John Banville is included while Booker Prize winners such as Canadian Margaret Atwood are not. Still, the breadth and depth of this reference more than compensate for its flaws. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.Kevin O'Kelly, Somerville P.L., MACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
This powerful CD-ROM allows users full access to The Oxford Chronology of English Literature's 30,000 works by more than 4,000 authors. The CD-ROM features a clear and easy to use interface with a main screen that offers instantaneous access to the records grouped in three main indexes, according to the publication year, author, or title. Users can install the program to the hard drive or run it from the CD-ROM. The powerful advanced search capabilities of this CD-ROM allows users to search by author name, dates or gender, by title or subject of work, date of publication, or the name of the publisher. And full text searching with wild cards and Boolean operators enables fast and selective access to database records. Using an advanced search, users can quickly and easily check such specifics as subtitles of works; format (i.e. number of volumes); publisher/imprint details; place of publication; whether a work was published anonymously or pseudonymously; serialization details; where and when dramatic works were first performed; whether or not a work was illustrated and by whom It also makes it possible to group records according to shared characteristics in order to create lists which can be printed out or copied to a word processor. In many entries, additional annotation is provided, especially where this is relevant to an understanding of a work's composition or publishing history. Careful attention has also been paid to women, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh authors who wrote/write in English, to English regional writers, and working-class texts. And the Chronology has broadened the definition of literature to include a large number of works whose popularity serves to exemplify contemporary taste or which have contributed to the development of a particular popular genre, such as detective fiction. Works covered in the Chronology DT Fiction [novels, novellas, short-story collections, anthologies, selected juvenile fiction] DT Poetry [individual works, single-author collections, anthologies] DT Drama DT Literary Scholarship [editions of English texts, editions of classical and foreign texts, editions of letters, dictionaries and other reference works, critical studies] DT Non-Fiction [essays, travel and exploration, literary memoirs, biographical studies, philosophical and religious works, historiography, economics] System requirements: PC with minimum 166MHz Pentium-class processor; 64 Mb RAM; 20 Mb hard disc space; 8-speed CD-ROM drive; Windows 95, 98, 2000 or NT4; SVGA monitor or Macintosh computer with a PowerPC processor; Minimum 64 Mb of RAM (64 Mb highly recommended); 20 Mb hard disk space; 8-speed CD-ROM drive; Mac OS 8.1 or later; SVGA monitor: 640 x 480 pixels screen resolution.


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Thirty thousand works by 4,000 authors range from 1474-2000. Works are mostly by British authors published in Britain, but also included are exceptions made for foreign authors who have made their home in Britain (Henry James and V.S. Naipaul), and for authors of the colonial period who published principally with British houses. In addition to the chronology, the indexes in the second volume allow searches by author, translated author, and title. Content is dominated by works of the imagination (poetry, drama, novels, and short stories); but biographies, letters, criticism, philosophical and religious texts, and reference works are also covered. The first volume, the chronology, begins in 1474 with a work of fiction, Wm. Caxton's . The entry conveys that this was the first book printed by Caxton in English, probably in Bruges by Caxton's company, W. Caxton and C. Mansion, and brought out in subsequent editions in 1502, 1553, 1597. Also shown is that Caxton was born around 1422 and alive at the time of publication (the birth year allows a calculation of the author's age at the time of publication). Other entries provide the same kind of information. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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