Featuring entries on nearly 500 writers and approximately 550 works, this new edition "represents a comprehensive and authoritative survey of literatures written in languages other than English." The chronological range is vast, beginning with the Vedas and the Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with contemporary works such as Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.
Volume 1 provides two- to three-page profiles of authors from Abe Kobo (Japanese) to Carl Zuckmayer (German); in between are authors from France, Haiti, Egypt, Spain, Lithuania, Ukraine, Iceland, and Tunisia, to name but a few. The editors state that this edition "provides expanded coverage of literatures in less represented languages, the primary focus being Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as previously unrepresented languages including Albanian, Estonian, Indonesian, Kurdish, and Thai." In addition, more contemporary women writers are profiled than in earlier editions.
In the author entries, brief biographical data are given when known: birth date and place, education, family, career summary, awards given, and death date. This is followed by a selected list of publications, references to bibliographies on the author, and references to full-length critical studies for further research. Finally, signed essays provide a critical evaluation of the author and his or her work. A list of contributors is available, as are a chronological list of writers and an alphabetical list of writers and works.
Author articles are cross-referenced to volume 2, which contains detailed entries on individual literary works presented in alphabetical order by title. Here, again, coverage is expansive — one finds essays on, among others, Around the World in Eighty Days, Hansel and Gretel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Bovary, and The Rubaiyat. This volume also provides a section of notes on advisors and contributors from universities worldwide, an index of authors and titles by language, and an alphabetical title index.
Reference Guide to World Literature is indeed a useful tool for researchers and aficionados of international literature. It is a worthy companion to works such as Contemporary World Writers (St. James, 1993), Cyclopedia of World Authors (Salem, 1997), Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century (St. James, 1998), and Gale's World Literature and Its Times series. Although not inexpensive, it is especially recommended for academic and large public libraries lacking coverage in the area.