The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature e.d by Robert Welch and The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing e.d by John Sturrock
John O'Brien

Robert Welch, ed. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Oxford Univ. Press, 1997. 614 pp. $49.95; John Sturrock, ed. The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing. Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. 492 pp. $35.00.

The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature is an excellent encyclopedic guide to Irish literature. Someone else may be able to find writers who are omitted, but I couldn’t. Any companion that gets both Bernard Share (Innish, The Merciful Hour) and the experimental Gaelic novelist Séamus Mac Annaidh is, it seems to me, getting almost everyone. Beyond this inclusiveness, however, is some very good and accurate writing about the writers and books. All in all, a first-rate performance. The second of these volumes, The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing, runs into the kinds of problems to which such guides are nearly doomed. The method here is a collection of overview essays covering contemporary writing (i.e., 1945 onwards) in twenty-eight countries, leaving each contributor with about sixteen pages. You can see the problem. Some of the contributors do a very good job of pulling off this impossible task (John Taylor covering the French) but others work less well (Patricia Craig on Irish literature). The problem, of course, is that the writers must try to come up with some kind of thesis or another, and then must try to include as many writers and titles as they can manage, which inevitably leads to problems of who will be included, who barely mentioned, who not mentioned at all. Wendy Lesser got the task of covering the United States in twenty-five pages, which begins with Truman Capote, the New Journalism (remember the New Journalism?), David Koresh in Waco, Texas, and so on. Since writers and tastes and movements change in the United States as quickly as James Atlas can decide what’s hip and what isn’t, there is no way to write this history without appearing either to have no point of view or chucking most of what happened and writing about what you want. Lesser, perhaps wisely, chose the former but then of course completely omits writers and books that, finally, are more important than, for instance, the New Journalists. The volume may prove that such a history can no longer be written because we know too much or that we need a curmudgeonly Ford Madox Ford to do the job. [John O’Brien]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature e.d by Robert Welch and The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing e.d by John Sturrock John O'Brien Robert Welch, ed. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Oxford Univ. Press, 1997. 614 pp. $49.95; John Sturrock, ed. The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing. Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. 492 pp. $35.00. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature is an excellent encyclopedic guide to Irish literature. Someone else may be able to find writers who are omitted, but I couldn’t. Any companion that gets both Bernard Share (Innish, The Merciful Hour) and the experimental Gaelic novelist Séamus Mac Annaidh is, it seems to me, getting almost everyone. Beyond this inclusiveness, however, is some very good and accurate writing about the writers and books. All in all, a first-rate performance. The second of these volumes, The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing, runs into the kinds of problems to which such guides are nearly doomed. The method here is a collection of overview essays covering contemporary writing (i.e., 1945 onwards) in twenty-eight countries, leaving each contributor with about sixteen pages. You can see the problem. Some of the contributors do a very good job of pulling off this impossible task (John Taylor covering the French) but others work less well (Patricia Craig on Irish literature). The problem, of course, is that the writers must try to come up with some kind of thesis or another, and then must try to include as many writers and titles as they can manage, which inevitably leads to problems of who will be included, who barely mentioned, who not mentioned at all. Wendy Lesser got the task of covering the United States in twenty-five pages, which begins with Truman Capote, the New Journalism (remember the New Journalism?), David Koresh in Waco, Texas, and so on. Since writers and tastes and movements change in the United States as quickly as James Atlas can decide what’s hip and what isn’t, there is no way to write this history without appearing either to have no point of view or chucking most of what happened and writing about what you want. Lesser, perhaps wisely, chose the former but then of course completely omits writers and books that, finally, are more important than, for instance, the New Journalists. The volume may prove that such a history can no longer be written because we know too much or that we need a curmudgeonly Ford Madox Ford to do the job. [John O’Brien]

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