Library Services Overview: Reference Books

In 155 volumes, provides an extensive collection of critical essays on contemporary writers. Each entry also contains a biographical/critical introduction including pseudonyms and nationality, a listing of principal works, and sources for further study.

Here is the eagerly awaited new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry brought completely up to date and dramatically expanded by poet David Lehman. It is a rich, capacious volume, featuring the work of more than 200 poets-almost three times as many as the 1976 edition. With a succinct and often witty head note introducing each author, it is certain to become the definitive anthology of American poetry for our time. Lehman has gathered together all the works one would expect to find in a landmark collection of American poetry, from Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry to Stevens's The Idea of Order at Key West, and from Eliot's The Waste Land to Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

A century of critical discussion about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic, "The Yellow Wallpaper," is combined with excerpts from Gilman's autobiography and interpretations of the story's imagery, plot, and psychological significance

This new edition has taken years to prepare and is much more than a simple updating. The world of science fiction in the 1990s is much more complex than it was back in the late 1970s. The advent of game worlds, shared worlds, graphic novels, film and tv spin-offs, technothrillers, survivalist fiction, of horror novels and fantasy novels with of centres has necessitated a radical revision, and this has allowed the inclusion of related subjects, such as magic realism. Accordingly, the book has expanded dramatically in order to cope with the complexities and changes. It now contains well over 4,300 entries - a staggering 1,500 more than the original - and, at 1.2 million words, it is over half a million words longer than the first edition. This is the indispensable reference work not only for every reader who loves, uses and wishes to know more about science fiction, but for every reader of imaginative fiction at the end of this century.

In clear, succinct, non-technical language, this new dictionary of more than 850 literary terms and themes takes an expanded view of the term "literary." It is the first book of its kind to give students and general readers not only a traditional literary vocabulary but also the knowledge of related theoretical, historical, and cultural terms they need in the interdisciplinary world of contemporary literary studies.