Published annually since 1985, the Handbook series provides a compendium of thorough and integrative literature reviews on a diverse array of topics of interest to the higher education scholarly and policy communities. Each chapter provides a comprehensive review of research findings on a selected topic, critiques the research literature in terms of its conceptual and methodological rigor, and sets forth an agenda for future research intended to advance knowledge on the chosen topic. The Handbook freeduann.com focuses on twelve general areas that encompass the salient dimensions of scholarly and policy inquiries undertaken in the international higher education community. The series is fortunate to have attracted annual contributions from distinguished scholars throughout the world.

"Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism"

by Martin Coyle

If you are a graduate student in literature or library science, don't miss this beauty. The scholarship is incredible; the amount of information is amazing.
Ninety essays cover subjects as diverse as feminist theatre, postmodernism, medieval literature, romantic poetry, Marxist criticism, censorship, realism and the novel, contemporary American poetry, New Historicism, the origins of the modern stage, the renaissance, women and the poetic tradition, the printed book, and Shakespeare and eighteenth-century fiction.

Each essay seeks to provide the reader with a clear sense of the full significance of its subject as well as guidance for further reading.

Assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, this book gives a rounded and balanced view of Arab literary creativity. 'High' literature is examined alongside popular folk literature, and the classical and modern periods, usually treated separately, are presented together. Cachia's observations are not subordinated to any pre-formed literary theory, but describe and illustrate the directions taken, in order to present an overall picture of the field of relevance to the student of literature as well as to Arabists working in related fields.

The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature will be a useful addition to collections on feminism and/or Italian culture at all levels. It nicely complements Italian Women Writers by the same editor and publisher, published in 1994.

Literature (The New Critical Idiom)
Literature, the latest volume in the highly successful New Critical Idiom series, is at once a compact mine of information about the development and more recent discrediting of the concept of "literature," and a reflection on the contemporary nature, place and function of what the literary might mean for us today. Comprehensive in scope, it offers a concise history of the consitution of a canonic concept of "literature" from its earliest origins to the orthodoxies that occurred through the later nineteenth-century to the middle of the twentieth. It also traces its dismantling from the late-60s onward. Finally, the book attemps to recuperate a notion of "the literary" by way of a series of readings of diverse texts. It is an excellent primer for anyone who loves the written word.