... during his absence more than 1,500 items in American literature listed in the latest MLA bibliography. It seemed to me that there was a real need for an annual review in which various scholars would survey the past year s work in American literature within their particular areas of competence He also...

...David J. Nordloh Duke University Press 2004 Foreword The present volume is the 40th in this continuing series. In his founding foreword to the first volume, covering work published in 1963, James Woodress commented that the more than 1,500 items listed in American literature...

... ography of published items (subdivided according to the needs of the particular material) and of periodicals relevant to the topic. Inge supplies a general introduction to popular culture (pp. xv–xxv) and Michael Dunne an essay on ‘‘The Study of Popular Culture’’ (pp. xxvii–li...

... 1,300 additional resources identified in its notes and the cita- tions of reviews of roughly 60 percent of the primary items). Even Harner s comment on the few Web resources appearing among the pri- mary citations reflects his care: The Web is too unstructured, unregu- 518 General Reference Works...

... slave narratives, then excerpts from 7 WPA-collected narratives, and then 45 oral histories edited from interviews conducted with assistance by Govenar himself. However, neither the headnotes to these items nor the general organization pursues in any coherent way the announced ‘‘fron- tier’’ thesis...

..., selected for their expertise in the areas they address in their chapters, are charged to review items they identify as significant to scholarly work in the field; they have no obligation to discuss everything appearing in print, and they are not limited to those items recorded in the MLA...

... inventories of catego- rized authors, historical periods, and niche genres continue to accu- mulate. Among these segmented perspectives the significant items are several big-topic books, especially a comprehensive literary history by British scholar Richard J. Gray, a four-volume literary...

..., the majority of these additions books, and the majority of them focused on military and political topics. But there is a “Literature” chapter, subdivided into “Literature and the War,” only 10 items long, and “Korean War Novels,” a more useful inventory of 32 titles. McFarland’s annotation is brief...

... of an introduction and five survey chapters (“Literature and Drama,” “Film and Photography,” “Music and Radio,” “Art and Design,” and “New Deal Culture with each chapter in turn supplemented by detailed inset discussion of three relevant items. In “Literature and Drama” these are John Steinbeck’s Grapes...

.... Compilation of the Bibliography is a painstaking and continuous process and is never quite complete: a print volume, when it appears, does not comprehensively record all relevant items published during that year. Meantime, the Internet is rapidly displacing the library reference room as the first stop...

... literature, this year produces books on popular media and postwar suburbs but not on American drama. Let us hope that these trends too, like some scholarly tastes, are transitory. Those books and articles that did make the cut this year are itemized herein. i Theater History The intent of Thomas S...

... for the names of publishers; journal titles make use of standard Modern Language Association abbreviations; Festschriften and essay collections cited multiple times, often in multiple chapters, are assigned short titles; and introductory lists supply the complete, expanded forms of all of these items...

... encompassing much the same historical period as these two encyclopedias is Raymond Irwin, Books on Early American History and Culture, 1951–1960: An Annotated Bibliography (Praeger). Irwin’s “early” is 1492–1815. His inventory of relevant materials is 935 items long, and he organizes them into 31...

... 1881 1910. Many are only one or two lines long, but more substantial items include reaction to the publication of Huckleberry Finn and first reactions to the Villa di Quarto outside Florence. The final item is a letter telegram dated 26 January 1910, from Bermuda, in which Twain writes, I expect...

...–215) Paul A. Orlov emphasizes the need for more thorough bibliographical work on Dreiser. He points out that even the annual MLA bibliographies are incomplete and often behind in listing recent items, so they are not altogether dependable. He also calls for a “Theodore Dreiser A–Z” volume from...

... of these items are unavailable in English. For instance, over a third of the material treating Vladimir Nabokov is published only in languages other than English, which precludes the mention of those items in this chapter. However, the proliferation of international scholarship on writ- ers of the United States...

..., on readership and the marketplace, and on language. I would estimate that To Wake is cited in one-fourth of the 90 or so items reported on. The quality of the scholarship overall does not flag. One sparkling essay teases us into new thinking about positivism; examinations of literary texts...

... a library shelf. Possible, though not very likely. Internet search engines have made the time-consuming process of locating the appropriate printed source and turning to the right page for a specific item of information, whether obvious or arcane, unnecessary: even the clumsiest formulation...

... Performance: Plays, People, Move- ments, ed. Annemarie Bean (Routledge), mostly reprints articles orig- inally published in the Drama Review with a few newly commissioned items, all of them focused on the influential performances of the Black Arts Movement of the ’60s and the New Black Renaissance...

... to Kinnamon’s A Richard Wright Bibliogra- phy: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary (see AmLS 1988, p. 416), the volume provides brief annotations for almost 10,000 items relating to Wright that were published between 1983 and 2003. In addition, Kinnamon includes entries for Wright items...