This very slender book is not a bad afternoon read, but ultimately it fails in what it attempts to do.
The author himself comes off as pompous and disengaging, as his "trivia" book is little more than a brief collection of personal opinions of his favorite Christmas Carol versions. These thinly veiled reviews lack the calibre of even your local TV Guide synopses. The only real trivia examples here are in classroom style question-exercises included at the end of each chapter! While I have no problem with this, the author postures himself as the true expert on A Christmas Carol with no real exposition as to why said versions are his favorite! I am giving it three stars, though, as the subject matter remains enjoyable no matter how clumsily presented.
Also worth noting- The recent Patrick Stewart version is omitted from this collection. Sacrilege!

If you're a Fan of Dickens Christmas Carol, like I am, you might enjoy this book.

It has Chapters on Dickens, the story and it's creation and the many Film, T.V, and Cartoon versions. I don't agree with the author that the movie Scrooged is so avfull, I'm not saying it's a Great movie But I found it quite Funny actually.

But apart from that this is a Fun Book to read around Christmas time when you have reeread Christmas Carol, watched all your Christmas Carol Videos, stuffed yourself full of Marsipan, Chocolate and Sherry and been visited by the Ghost of Christmas past.

What a fun book to read. I love 'A Christmas Carol,' and this book puts everything 'Carol' right at your fingertips. For the most part, I agree with much of what the author says, but I feel that 'An American Christmas Carol' and 'Scrooged' deserve higher ratings. I also prefer the George C. Scott version above all others.
This book is broken down so the reader will not only be able to read about the many different film versions of a 'Carol' that have been released, but the cartoon, television, and even the original book version is reviewed as well. An example of what I learned is that I had no idea that there was a version starring Sir Seymour Hicks filmed back in 1935 until I read about it in this book. I then searched out and found a (rather poor, unfortunately) copy of THAT version. There is also a small biography of Mr. Dickens, so the reader will understand where many of his ideas for his novels came from.
The writing style is quick, informative (LOTS of trivia and pictures throughout!), and upbeat.
I don't know if this has been updated to include the Patrick Stewart version or not, as I purchased this book back in '97. I will definitely pick up a revised copy should one become available.
A great bathroom book!

I had never read one of Dickens book before Nicholas Nickleby, though I had always wanted to. I particularly enjoyed this book because of Dicken's subtle sense of humor and colorful characters. It was easy to hate the villains such as Squeers or Ralph Nickleby, and laugh at the amusing chracters of Mr. Mantalini and John Brody(whom I found to be the funniest) Authenticity of personality and speech allows you to connect with the various chracters. Although he was probably the least complex, my favorite was Smike, the pitiful victim of the Yorkshire schools of the 1800s.
The one drawback was the size of this book. Dickens spent much time giving detail of many places and people (and did a good job of it), but we must draw the line somewhere. Just when one thinks enough words have been spent on one topic, it diverges into yet another irrevelant matter.
I'd recommend this book to almost anyone, unless you have a great fear of commitment. But the book has plenty of plot and satire to hold you to the end. I certainly was, but I don't think my librarian would believe me.

Nicholas Nickleby is a marvelous novel. It is the young Dickens at his best. I almost feel guilty for giving it four stars, but giving it five would be unfair, I think, because his later works, such as Great Expectations, are bettter. The novel is written enthusiastically and contains some of Dickens' best humor. I especially found funny the character Mr.Lillyvick, the revered and dignified water clerk. And I will never forget Ralph Nickleby. Mr.Squeers and Arthur Gride were detestable and colorful villains, but they pale before Ralph Nickleby. He is such a cold and heartless character that he steals nearly every scene he is in. He has a certain magnetism that most of Dickens' good characters lack. And his suicide at the novel's end is so perfectly written that I read over it several times before I finished the novel. My only problem with the book was Nicholas's lack of psychology, but let us remember that this was written by a young man, not the mature artist of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. The novel's strengths easily make up for its weaknesses. Nicholas Nickleby will be enjoyed by fans of Dickens and all other readers for centuries to come.

"Nicholas Nickleby" is one of the best works of Charles Dickens overall. This novel is about the brave adventures of Nicholas, his sister Kate and their mother. The story begins at about the time Nicholas's father dies and the family has to encounter the struggle of life with no imminent prospects of fortune. At this time they make an appeal to the brother of Nicholas's father, Mr.Ralph Nickleby. From this point on, the parallel developments of the honest Nickleby family and their villanous uncle begin to unfold. With many twists and turns the story is as captivating as any of the author's best books. The tale is characteristically filled with the Dickinsian people such as Mr.Vincent Crummles and his family, in particular the "phenomenon", Arthur Gride, Newman Noggs and others. Overall, this book is a pleasure to read and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in good story-telling.

One of my friends recommended that I read Thomas Hardy, but she cautioned me: "Thomas Hardy isn't for everyone." I discovered while reading "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" that what she may have meant is that Thomas Hardy didn't write light works to be read and then forgotten about. Through this book, Hardy addresses issues that society in his day didn't want to face: the fate of the farm worker in the increasingly industrialized society, predjudices held against minority groups, and the inequality of women. All of this is not to say that this is a dry or boring work -- "Tess" is gripping, riveting, and almost overpowering in its emotional appeal. One cannot read this book without becoming involved in Tess's situation. I have never been so angry with a character in a book as I was with Angel Clare at a certain point in the novel. So, in conclusion, "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" isn't for everyone. . . but it should be for every thinking person, everyone who isn't afraid to face issues, think deeply about them, and apply them to life.

This book is tragic and wonderfully written. Hardy uses words to create a scene for you that creates the visual for you completely. I think that the sadest thing for me was to realize people did live like this, life really was that hard. As a 21st century woman I was outraged at the way that Tess was treated by men and by society. Who is the true bad guy, Alec or Angel? When we read it with our societies mores we perceive it one way, but if we were ken to the morals of that society how would we see it? Are they really dastards, or are they all just victims. I am not a scholar, I liked the story for being a good story.

After reading the book I rented the A&E movie. As I watched it, I realized how well the book translated into video, because I had already seen the exact same scenery in my mind. The only thing that surprised me was the bleakness of the trunip farm and Tesses horrible conditions. I couldn't imagine anything that awful.

There are a lot of words, similar to DH Lawrence, but I wouldn't get rid of a one of them. If you come to this book as a great story and not as a classic novel, you will hold Tess to your heart and never forget her tragedies.

Please ignore the immature high-school student reviews and understand that this book is a masterpiece. Hardy analyzes the relationship between human desire and society's mores to an unprecendented degree. The characters are multi-faceted and very life-like. Hardly aptly avoids the mistake of creating mere carciatures of the pure woman, idealistic intellectual, and spoiled playboy. Moreover, his use of religious allusion is excellent although this may alienate the modern, secular reader. And perhaps this is the problem with some readers. Finally, Tess is an admirable and strong woman who had difficult circumstances. How many people would act as admirably in her circumstance? Not many! The reviewers that criticize her actions should realize this and that they ignore one of Hardy's key points: Don't be so judgemental! This is one of the best books I have read and believe me, I have read a lot of the "good" books.

Disliking an Oxford Press book makes me feel like a heretic. The majority of their Companion books are superb, remarkably concise yet thorough works of scholarship. The English Companion is an unfortunate and surprising exception.

The entry for 'New Criticism' is an efficient example of the book's shortcomings. For one thing, there's a laundry list of authors, dates, and books but very little is said of the IDEAS that characterize New Criticism. The entries are generally hamstringed by a focus on the sociopolitical and historical aspects of writers and works. The effort is laudable but inappropriate and uneconomical for a reference work. In its most extreme form, the historical emphasis goes into bizarre detail about an author's upbringing -- is it really necessary that we know where an author went to grade school and when? Entries love to entertain tales of writers' deaths and and of their insignificant travellings. I often felt as though I were reading minibiographies.

One will also notice, in the case of 'New Criticism', the absence of any mention of the 'organic'. This is ridiculous and indicative of the book's lack of attention to concepts as such. There is a non-cross-referenced mention of 'organic' under Coleridge, yet even there it is only mentioned as one of his ideas, not in terms of what the theory tried to say. I would compare it to someone's asking, 'What does X mean?' This book's reply: 'X was one of so-and-so's ideas'. Too often, the response ends there. Literary theory entries are usually on the thin side, though the deconstruction essay is solid. However, even in the longest lit theory essays there is more of an emphasis on people and movements -- far less on ideas.

Along with the lack of depth (or conceptual emphasis), there's little sense of the overall significance of ideas, works or characters (ironic given the attempts at a social-historical approach): Caliban is mentioned in the Tempest entry, and even gets his own paragraph elsewhere, but there's nothing about his character as it's been re-elaborated and re-invented by a long tradition of English writers (Auden, Browning, Joyce, and Wilde for starters). There's nothing about Caliban's portrayal in that tradition, nor mention of Caliban's mirror, etc. Under 'hubris' (which is found, in turn, under a terse account of 'the Poetics'), there's nothing about Icarus, nor is there anything about hubris as a specific theme in so many works.

Speaking of hubris, it's baffling to me that Drabble's entry is longer than either Hill's or Heaney's. The general editor would have been better off focusing more of her energy on other writers: that expansive babbling space could have been put to stronger use had a more thorough background been given on either of those poets, among others.

Readers seeking to understand why an author alludes in his work to a character or poet will be little helped by nebulous terms like 'icily poised' or 'sensuously textured', which are more suggestive of gastronomic, rather than literary, criticism. To my mind a reference's primary function should be to offer a quick source of the 'essentials' of a book or of a writer's ideas, an understanding of which would illuminate one's reading of the alluding work. While I appreciate that entries shy away from 'this or that' critiques or strict (canonical) interpretations, giving lists of facts does an injustice to the works themselves and to the way these works have been interpreted by others. (Believe it or not, people CAN come to their own conclusions even after being introduced to an opinion.)

The book's scope is appropriate to literature, as literature tends to allude to so many disparate disciplines. But if one were truly trying to give an encyclopedic account of literature, the book would have to be much bigger. In this case, specialization suffers. I would have preferred a much more focused account of 'literature' as such; I'd then supplement this with other references focused, for example, on English history. One gets the sense that too many entries end up attenuated in this book.

On the positive side the plot summaries are strong and more nuanced, though many entries are badly written (full of odd, obscuring, convoluted syntax). Again, good editorship would have recognized this.

The book primarily succeeds as an enervated survey. Nevertheless, readers will occasionally happen upon some interesting, well-summarized topics.

I'm going to check out the Cambridgean counterpart to the Oxford Companion, and I'm hoping it will give a more in-depth account of ideas and themes. The other Oxford Companions are, however, truly amazing works and deserve a close look.

An excellent resource of information about English works of art

The first 'Oxford Companion to English Literature' was published in 1932 under the editorial direction of Sir Paul Harvey (no relation the American radio commentator). Half a century and five editions later, this is still a standard, authoritative reference work necessary for scholars and interested non-experts alike.

Under the editorship of Margaret Drabble, author and biographer (known for 'The Witch of Exmoor' and the more recently published 'The Peppered Moth'), this volume remains faithful to Harvey's intention of placing English literature in its widest possible context while exploring the deep classical and continental connections that underpin much of the history.

How can literature be divorced from cultural context? Surely it cannot be -- hence the newest entries into the edition include topics that read as if they were taken from today's best-seller shelf:

- Anglo-Indian Literature
- Simon Armitage
- Kate Atkinson
- Louis de Bernieres
- Censorship

- Ben Elton
- Gay and lesbian literature
- Hypertext
- A. L. Kennedy
- Lad's literature
- Literature of science
- New Criticism
- New Irish Playwrights
- Carol Shields
- Travel writing

This sample listing of the latest entries is representative of the more established categories, in that the entries (encyclopedic in character) include Authors, Subjects, Titles, Events, Characters and Critical Theory. The entries are unsigned (an ever-controversial practice in reference works such as this) -- well over a hundred contributors assisted in this volume, including the likes of Matthew Sweet, Salman Rushdie, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Katherine Duncan-Jones, and Brian Vickers.

This volume serves the general reader well in that one may follow cross-reference trails through the text. Take, for instance, Aaron the Moor -- the reader will be directed to Titus Andronicus, to which one is directed to Shakespeare, and from there a host of other cross-references historical and modern. Under the entry of Gabriel Josipovici, one is led back the entries of Rabelais and Bellow, influences as well as objects of Josipovici's study.

The appendices are new features of this edition. The first appendix is a Chronology that lists the chronology of the production of English literature from c.1000 to 1999 side by side with major historical events in Britain and beyond, and the significant events in the lives of literary figures. Appendix 2 lists the Poets Laureate in chronological order, from 1619 (when the office unofficially began) to the present -- surprisingly, there have only been 21 (19 official). Appendix 3 lists major literary award winners: Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Library Association Carnegie Medalists, and Booker-McConnell Prize for Fiction. Obviously not all of these are British authors, but it helps to place British literature in the wider world context of the twentieth century (as all of these prizes are twentieth-century creations).

In addition to the encyclopedic entries, there are major essays scattered through the text. These include the following topics:

- Biography
- Black British Literature
- Children's Literature
- Detective Fiction
- Fantasy Fiction
- Ghost Stories
- Gothic Fiction
- Historical Fiction
- Metre
- Modernism
- Post-Colonial Literature
- Romanticism
- Science Fiction
- Spy Fiction
- Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

These essays include history and current development of the genre or topic, as well as bibliographic information for further research, which (regrettably) the smaller encyclopedic entries rarely have.

This is a terrific, one-volume reference that should serve well anyone with a need for quick and ready reference material. It should find a welcome home on the shelf of any avid reader, fan of literature and modern fiction, history, religion, or any devoted Anglophile.

If you ever saw Sheridan's play "The Rivals," you might have heard this book mentioned. It's the book the daughter doesn't want her mother to know she is reading.

It pre-dates Jane Eyre, but it has that poor-lonely-orphan-wronged-by-the-world quality to it. Picture Jane Eyre as a young, red-headed Scotsman with a thin-skin, bad temper and active libido. Roderick's going to London reminded me of D'Artagnan arrival in Paris in "The Three Musketeers". His mere presence is often a cause of confict. There are insults, fights, brawls, battles, sea clashes, duels, and some more insults. Roderick is the world's punching bag and his own pride and scheming won't let him say, "I've had enough." All the while his hot blood is leading him into haylofts, bedrooms and yet more trouble.

Will this 18th-century punk ever wise up? Read for yourself. I suggest the Oxford World's Classics version. I didn't expect the footnotes, but they were a great boon. The language is archaic in places, so keep a dictionary handy.

A pretty good collection. It includes "The Adventures ofMaster F.J.," by George Gascoigne; "Euphues: The Anatomy ofWit," by John Lyly; "Pandosto: The Triumph of Time," by Robert Greene; "The Unfortunate Traveller," by Thomas Nashe; and "Jack of Newbury," by Thomas Deloney. I reckon Nashe's book is probably the best. "Euphues" was perhaps the first important work of English fiction, and it was quite a sensation in its time. "Pandosto" was the source for Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale."

This is by no means an exhaustive or long-winded work, but it is a quick and easy reference tool for Dickens fans. If you want to find a name, date or idea in a matter of seconds, and read a summary of it, then this is your book. If you are a scholar searching for a comprehensive concordance to the works of Charles Dickens, this book will lack detail and depth.

A wealth of information! A fantastic book for anyone who loves Hardy's poems, short stories or novels and wants to know more about the man behind the pen. Much of the book's merit is in its lay-out. Each in the series of thirty-two chapters relates to a single work providing a wealth of penetrating insights into both biographical and literary facts (Hardy's passion for Greek tragedy, Latin poetry, Shakespeare, his interest in architecture and work as an architect, his marriage) - and how closely these were intertwined. Throughout the book there is a compelling sense of how compulsively Hardy the man worked to develop the extraordinarily creativity of Hardy the writer. A wide ranging and scholarly book that is wonderfully informative and never, ever dull.

Here's a Muldoon pastiche:

Basement

Then to spy
in an unused cellar spot

Under a bulb fixture
long since jury-rigged
in deal cast-off

And between oil tank
and salt-scalloped stone wall

--Between a ruck
and a carapace--

A tiny skeleton--mouse.

My instinct:
to trip-tipsy the dark

--As even the Dean
and Cuchulain might--

fantastic.

[My opinion is that Muldoon peaked in 1990 with his tour de force, MADOC--A Mystery, the book-length poem and astounding work of the imagination. MADOC was large, confounding, mysterious, lyrical, and sui generis (really). Yet many readers/reviewers did not appreciate it. Since that work, Muldoon seemingly has tried to obtain such appreciation by offering more manageable fare--featuring topical themes, easy wit, sentiment, form, and rhyme (not to mention all those pretty names of Irish places). He has served up plates of warm apercus. If that is your thing--fine. He is terribly accomplished--his more recent poems, including those of Moy Sand and Gravel, sparkle with polish and panache. But I will take the polar edge of the creative MADOC thankyouverymuch.]

Anyone who idolizes Dicaprio should not be allowed to read Rimbaud. In all actuallity, this book(like the movie) was uninformitive and dull. It focuses more on Verlaines psychology than Rimbauds--and as we all know, Verlaine was an ugly man. Im sick of hearing about this piece, it was lame. I only pray that all the teenie boppers of the world don't start reading Rimbaud since they love Dicaprio so much---it might actually give them a glimpse of what real life is like, and we wouldn't want to upset there little minds...now would we?

What a pretentious piece of garbage, both the screenplay and the movie itself. One is better served by reading Rimbaud's poems themselves. If you've never read Rimbaud, please do yourself a favor and stay away from the movie and screenplay. Stick with the poems.

Without seeing the actual film, I was stunned by the screenplay. Not only are the words captivating and true to poets Rimbaud and Verlaine but the actual film directions are provocative and insightful. The entire piece is beautifully complex. "The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable" I'll be honest, I find it a damn shame to have DiCaprio playing the role only because I feel that the movie will be taken less seriously and Rimbaud will forever be a teen dream in the minds of many.