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into the future or, less commonly, an extrapolation in the present or even into the past.
semiotics: The science of signs and sign systems in communication. According to Roman Jakobson, semiotics deals with the principles that underlie the structure of signs, their use in language of all kinds, and the specific nature of various sign systems.
sentimental novel: A form of fiction popular in the eighteenth century in which emotionalism and optimism are the primary characteristics. The best-known examples are
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741) and Oliver Gold-
smith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).
setting: The circumstances and environment, both temporal and spatial, of a narrative.
spatial form: An author’s attempt to make the reader apprehend a work spatially in a moment of time rather than sequentially. To achieve this effect, the author breaks up the
narrative into interspersed fragments. Beginning with James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Djuna Barnes, the movement toward spatial form is concomitant with the modernist effort to supplant historical time in fiction with mythic time. For the seminal discussion of this technique, see Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre (1963).
stream of consciousness: The depiction of the thought processes of a character, insofar as this is possible, without any mediating structures. The metaphor of consciousness as a
“stream” suggests a rush of thoughts and images governed by free association rather
than by strictly rational development. The term “stream of consciousness” is often
used loosely as a synonym for interior monologue. The most celebrated example of stream of consciousness in fiction is the monologue of Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922); other notable practitioners of the stream-of-consciousness technique include Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.
structuralism: As a movement of thought, structuralism is based on the idea of intrinsic, self-sufficient structures that do not require reference to external elements. A structure is a system of transformations that involves the interplay of laws inherent in the system itself. The study of language is the primary model for contemporary structuralism. The
structuralist literary critic attempts to define structural principles that operate inter-280
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textually throughout the whole of literature as well as principles that operate in genres and in individual works. One of the most accessible surveys of structuralism and literature available is Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975).
summary: Those parts of a fiction that do not need to be detailed. In Tom Jones (1749), Henry Fielding says, “If whole years should pass without producing anything worthy
of . . . notice . . . we shall hasten on to matters of consequence.”
thematics: According to Northrop Frye, when a work of fiction is written or interpreted thematically, it becomes an illustrative fable. Murray Krieger defines thematics as “the study of the experiential tensions which, dramatically entangled in the literary work,
become an existential reflection of that work’s aesthetic complexity.”
tone: The dominant mood of a work of fiction. (See atmosphere.)
unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account of the events of the story cannot be trusted, obliging readers to reconstruct—if possible—the true state of affairs themselves. Once
an innovative technique, the use of the unreliable narrator has become commonplace
among contemporary writers who wish to suggest the impossibility of a truly “reli-
able” account of any event. Notable examples of the unreliable narrator can be found in
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955).
Victorian novel: Although the Victorian period extended from 1837 to 1901, the term
“Victorian novel” does not include the later decades of Queen Victoria’s reign. The
term loosely refers to the sprawling works of novelists such as Charles Dickens and
William Makepeace Thackeray—works that frequently appeared first in serial form
and are characterized by a broad social canvas.
vraisemblance/verisimilitude: Tzvetan Todorov defines vraisemblance as “the mask which conceals the text’s own laws, but which we are supposed to take for a relation to
reality.” Verisimilitude refers to a work’s attempts to make the reader believe that it
conforms to reality rather than to its own laws.
Western novel: Like all varieties of genre fiction, the Western novel—generally known simply as the Western—is defined by a relatively predictable combination of conventions, motifs, and recurring themes. These predictable elements, familiar from many Western films and television series, differentiate the Western from historical novels and idiosyncratic works such as Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964) that are also set in the Old West. Conversely, some novels set in the contemporary West are regarded as Westerns because they deal with modern cowboys and with the land itself in
the manner characteristic of the genre.
Charles E. May
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Guide to Online Resources
Web Sites
The following sites were visited by the editors of Salem Press in 2009. Because URLs frequently change, the accuracy of these addresses cannot be guaranteed; however, long-
standing sites, such as those of colleges and universities, national organizations, and government agencies, generally maintain links when sites are moved or updated.
American Literature on the Web
http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit
Among this site’s features are several pages providing links to Web sites about specific genres and literary movements, southern and southwestern American literature, minority
literature, literary theory, and women writers, as well as an extensive index of links to electronic text collections and archives. Users also can access information for five specific time periods: 1620-1820, 1820-1865, 1865-1914, 1914-1945, and since 1945. A range of
information is available for each period, including alphabetical lists of authors that link to more specific information about each writer, time lines of historical and literary events, and links to related additional Web sites.
Books and Writers
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/indeksi.htm
This broad, comprehensive, and easy-to-use resource provides access to information
about hundreds of authors throughout the world, extending from 70 b.c.e to the twenty-
first century. Links take users from an alphabetical list of authors to pages featuring biographical material, lists of works, and recommendations for further reading about individual authors; each writer’s page also includes links to related pages on the site. Although brief, the biographical essays provide solid overviews of the authors’ careers, their contributions to literature, and their literary influences.
The Canadian Literature Archive
http://www.umanitoba.ca/canlit
Created and maintained by the English Department at the University of Manitoba, this
site is a comprehensive collection of materials for and about Canadian writers. It includes an alphabetical listing of authors with links to additional Web-based information. Users also can retrieve electronic texts, announcements of literary events, and videocasts of
author interviews and readings.
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A Celebration of Women Writers
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women
This site presents an extensive compendium of information about the contributions of
women writers throughout history. The “Local Editions by Authors” and “Local Editions
by Category” pages include access to electro
nic texts of the works of numerous writers,
including Louisa May Alcott, Djuna Barnes, Grazia Deledda, Edith Wharton, and Vir-
ginia Woolf. Users can also access biographical and bibliographical information by
browsing lists arranged by writers’ names, countries of origin, ethnicities, and the
centuries in which they lived.
Contemporary Writers
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors
Created by the British Council, this site offers “up-to-date profiles of some of the U.K.
and Commonwealth’s most important living writers (plus writers from the Republic of
Ireland that we’ve worked with).” The available information includes biographies, bibli-
ographies, critical reviews, news about literary prizes, and photographs. Users can search the site by author, genre, nationality, gender, publisher, book title, date of publication, and prize name and date.
Internet Public Library: Native American Authors
http://www.ipl.org/div/natam
Internet Public Library, a Web-based collection of materials, includes this index to re-
sources about writers of Native American heritage. An alphabetical list of authors enables users to link to biographies, lists of works, electronic texts, tribal Web sites, and other online resources. The majority of the writers covered are contemporary Indian authors, but some historical authors also are featured. Users also can retrieve information by browsing lists of titles and tribes. In addition, the site contains a bibliography of print and online materials about Native American literature.
LiteraryHistory.com
http://www.literaryhistory.com
This site is an excellent source of academic, scholarly, and critical literature about
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century American and English writers. It provides
numerous pages about specific eras and genres, including individual pages for eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century literature and for African American and postcolonial
literature. These pages contain alphabetical lists of authors that link to articles, reviews, overviews, excerpts of works, teaching guides, podcast interviews, and other materials.
The eighteenth century literature page also provides access to information about the
eighteenth century novel.
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Literary Resources on the Net
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit
Jack Lynch of Rutgers University maintains this extensive collection of links to
Internet sites that are useful to academics, including numerous Web sites about American and English literature. This collection is a good place to begin online research about the novel, as it links to hundreds of other sites with broad ranges of literary topics. The site is organized chronically, with separate pages for information about the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, the eighteenth century, the Romantic and Victorian eras, and twentieth cen-
tury British and Irish literature. It also has separate pages providing links to Web sites about American literature and to women’s literature and feminism.
LitWeb
http://litweb.net
LitWeb provides biographies of more than five hundred world authors throughout his-
tory that can be accessed through an alphabetical listing. The pages about each writer contain a list of his or her works, suggestions for further reading, and illustrations. The site also offers information about past and present winners of major literary prizes.
The Modern Word: Authors of the Libyrinth
http://www.themodernword.com/authors.html
The Modern Word site, although somewhat haphazard in its organization, provides a
great deal of critical information about writers. The “Authors of the Libyrinth” page is very useful, linking author names to essays about them and other resources. The section of the page headed “The Scriptorium” presents “an index of pages featuring writers who
have pushed the edges of their medium, combining literary talent with a sense of experi-
mentation to produce some remarkable works of modern literature.” The site also includes sections devoted to Samuel Beckett, Umberto Eco, Gabriel García Márquez, James Joyce,
Franz Kafka, and Thomas Pynchon.
Novels
http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/default.htm
This overview of American and English novels was prepared by Agatha Taormina, a
professor at Northern Virginia Community College. It contains three sections: “History”
provides a definition of the novel genre, a discussion of its origins in eighteenth century England, and separate pages with information about genres and authors of nineteenth century, twentieth century, and postmodern novels. “Approaches” suggests how to read
a novel critically for greater appreciation, and “Resources” provides a list of books about the novel.
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Outline of American Literature
http://www.america.gov/publications/books/outline-of-american-literature.html
This page of the America.gov site provides access to an electronic version of the ten-
chapter volume Outline of American Literature, a historical overview of prose and poetry from colonial times to the present published by the U.S. Department of State. The work’s author is Kathryn VanSpanckeren, professor of English at the University of Tampa. The
site offers links to abbreviated versions of each chapter as well as access to the entire publication in PDF format.
Voice of the Shuttle
http://vos.ucsb.edu
One of the most complete and authoritative places for online information about litera-
ture, Voice of the Shuttle is maintained by professors and students in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The site provides thousands of links to electronic books, academic journals, association Web sites, sites created by university
professors, and many, many other resources about the humanities. Its “Literature in Eng-
lish” page provides links to separate pages about the literature of the Anglo-Saxon era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and seventeenth century, the Restoration and eighteenth
century, the Romantic age, the Victorian age, and modern and contemporary periods in
Britain and the United States, as well as a page focused on minority literature. Another page on the site, “Literatures Other than English,” offers a gateway to information about the literature of numerous countries and world regions.
Electronic Databases
Electronic databases usually do not have their own URLs. Instead, public, college, and university libraries subscribe to these databases, provide links to them on their Web sites, and make them available to library card holders or other specified patrons. Readers can visit library Web sites or ask reference librarians to check on availability.
Canadian Literary Centre
Produced by EBSCO, the Canadian Literary Centre database contains full-text content
from ECW Press, a Toronto-based publisher, including the titles in the publisher’s Cana-
dian fiction studies, Canadian biography, and Canadian writers and their works series,
ECW’s Biographical Guide to Canadian Novelists, and George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Fiction. Author biographies, essays and literary criticism, and book reviews are among the database’s offerings.
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Literary Reference Center
EBSCO’s Literary Reference Center (LRC) is a comprehensive full-text database de-
signed primarily to help high school and undergraduate students in English and the hu-
/> manities with homework and research assignments about literature. The database con-
tains massive amounts of information from reference works, books, literary journals, and other materials, including more than 31,000 plot summaries, synopses, and overviews of
literary works; almost 100,000 essays and articles of literary criticism; about 140,000 author biographies; more than 605,000 book reviews; and more than 5,200 author inter-
views. It also contains the entire contents of Salem Press’s MagillOnLiterature Plus. Users can retrieve information by browsing a list of authors’ names or titles of literary works; they can also use an advanced search engine to access information by numerous categories, including author name, gender, cultural identity, national identity, and the years in which he or she lived, or by literary title, character, locale, genre, and publication date. The Literary Reference Center also features a literary-historical time line, an encyclopedia of literature, and a glossary of literary terms.
MagillOnLiterature Plus
MagillOnLiterature Plus is a comprehensive, integrated literature database produced
by Salem Press and available on the EBSCO host platform. The database contains the full text of essays in Salem’s many literature-related reference works, including Masterplots, Cyclopedia of World Authors, Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, Cyclopedia of Literary Places, Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Critical Survey of Short Fiction, World Philosophers and Their Works, Magill’s Literary Annual, and Magill’s Book Reviews. Among its contents are articles on more than 35,000 literary works and more than 8,500 writers, poets, dramatists, essays, and philosophers, more than 1,000 images, and a glossary of more than 1,300 literary terms. The biographical essays include lists of authors’ works and secondary bibliographies, and almost four hundred overview essays offer information about
literary genres, time periods, and national literatures.
NoveList
NoveList is a readers’ advisory service produced by EBSCO. The database provides
access to 155,000 titles of both adult and juvenile fiction as well information about literary awards, book discussion guides, feature articles about a range of literary genres, and “recommended reads.” Users can search by author name, book title, or series title or can de-