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Rating: 
Summary: The Literary Reference Guide
Review: I'm going back into a Masters Program and plan to teach English for a living. Already this book has proved to be a valuable resource when surveying various schools of criticism. The cross-referenced index is a bit confusing, but this is a nice book that you may want to sit down with and read for awhile anyway. I've found some wonderful items in here, and it's fun to flip through, looking for previously unknown literary schools that may catch my interest. It's a great reference book, but also a compelling source of information and direction. I laid out the bucks for this book because I know it will be a handy reference for the next thirty years. Already it's directed me to some outside reading that has proved quite profitable. I'll keep this guide close by as long as I am a student of Literature.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended to get your theoretical bearings
Review: Provides a consise, and yet sufficiently nuanced and complex, summary of theoretical schools, practitioners, terms, and trends. Hefty and yet readable reference material -- cross-indexed with more thorough bibliographies for each entry.
Rating:
Summary: All the benefits and liabilities of a good encyclopedia
Review: Theory, so called, is vast and complex and historical and contradictory. This volume is brief and clear and present oriented and structural. That the field and its survey are incommensurate is necessary, but the user should be aware of these limitations. The entries are clear and non-dogmatic but they must betray the liabilities of summary: concise average readings that hide problems, relations, and other voices. At root, modern theory is not intelligible without philosophical contexts that go to the pre-socratics, but that cannot appear here. Some choices of inclusion and exclusion seem odd: a separate entry for Orwell and none for Deleuze, for instance. But on the whole, this book is useful and well done.I bought it which is my highest rec.
Rating:
Summary: All the benefits and liabilities of a good encyclopedia
Review: Theory, so called, is vast and complex and historical and contradictory. This volume is brief and clear and present oriented and structural. That the field and its survey are incommensurate is necessary, but the user should be aware of these limitations. The entries are clear and non-dogmatic but they must betray the liabilities of summary: concise average readings that hide problems, relations, and other voices. At root, modern theory is not intelligible without philosophical contexts that go to the pre-socratics, but that cannot appear here. Some choices of inclusion and exclusion seem odd: a separate entry for Orwell and none for Deleuze, for instance. But on the whole, this book is useful and well done. I bought it which is my highest rec.
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