... (or mar- ket) for a printed volume. The dusty shelves in the bowels of a library have been superseded by plasma screens. Whether or not the printed book is dead, the bibliography has long since been buried. Trouble is, such a claim is akin to suggesting that because the text of Pudd’nhead Wilson...

... resources published in bulky multivolume sets. The best of the works oriented toward history is the pair of three- volume sets issued by Charles Scribner’s Sons, American History Through Literature, 1820–1870, ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer, and American History Through Literature...

...- volume Encyclopedia of American Literature (2002) into a four-volume set with the same title, under the supervision of Richard Layman and the late Matthew J. Bruccoli as editorial directors and Elizabeth Leverton as series editor. The individual entries with their brief accompanying lists...

... from the variety and general utility of volumes published this year. Many of these books—virtually all of them published by trade presses—continue to focus on ethnic, women, and/or regional writers. At its best, the DLB participates in this project of reclaiming marginalized or neglected...

... the an- nual volumes of American Literary Scholarship and like the best of the new reference publications I mention here. This year s work is highlighted by new editions of two comprehensive reference guides and by two new literary encyclopedias. The best of these, notable for the care and thoroughness of its...

... of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies (MLA), now updated into its fourth edition. Harner concisely summarizes the extent of his thorough and thoughtful revision, and in so doing suggests the precision infusing the volume: ‘‘In preparing the fourth edition, I assessed anew each...

... contributions to the literatures of groups and regions and places, volumes addressing the increasingly insistent topics of gay and lesbian literature and the literature of the environment, and—the greatest number—materials focused on specific genres in their American manifestations, ranging from...

...Gary Scharnhorst Duke University Press 2005 22 General Reference Works Gary Scharnhorst Though some reference books this year seem to dwell on very narrow or specialized subjects, at least these topics may be covered fully in a single volume. As in recent years, a number...

... of ‘‘writer’’ is broad enough to encompass William Wells Brown, Marcus Garvey, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Dick Gregory. The materials are extensively cross-referenced, the entire volume is indexed, and helpful appendices, also cross-referenced, highlight genre, chronology, and cate- gories of rsts Editor...

... in ever-increasing numbers to exploit a ‘‘market niche Unfortunately, these volumes are often issued by trade publishers looking to score a fast buck and as a result their quality varies wildly. The plight of many respected university presses these days may be attributed, I am...

... her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The two-volume Thom Gunn: A Bibliography by Jack W. C. Hagstrom and George Bixby (Oak Knoll) updates in its first volume the material about the Anglo-American poet covering the period 1940 to 1978 first printed in theBulletin of Bibliography in 1992–94...

...David J. Nordloh © 2014 Duke University Press 2014 Foreword With this volume American Literary Scholarship celebrates, quietly and without loud incendiary devices, its 50th anniversary. Over the ever- lengthening period of my coeditorship of the series I’ve been fortunate to also...

... 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...

... of Bibliography staggered to a close not with a bang but with a whimper. There have been no new volumes issued in the Cambridge Contemporary Reviews series since 2005. The ever-reliable G. K. Hall has been colonized by Scribner’s, and who speaks for the subdivision? The Twayne imprint is defunct. Even...

... for high school teachers, with chapters titled “Teaching an Interracial Issues Course” and “Books for Children and Young Adults,” but it covers other issues as well (e.g., transracial adoption and inter- racial dating and marriage). The five-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic...

...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...

... to a research library website with links to databases aplenty. Perhaps the most obvious examples of overpriced reference books in literary studies published in 2011 are the dozen volumes (numbered 302 through 313) in the Contemporary Authors series, each of them sub- titled A Bio-Bibliographical Guide...

... ( pp. 582–97) in the third. A useful ancillary feature of the volume is an exhaustive introductory “Chronology of the American Novel.” Similarly essay-centered is The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945, ed. John N. Duvall, consisting of 18 contributions grouped...

...-scholarship- on-ezra-pound/the-bibliographic-project), records two monographs, two collective volumes, and 59 articles and book chapters for the year. a. Readings in the Cantos The publication of the first volume of a projected three-volume set of Readings in the Cantos (Clemson) in the Ezra Pound Center...

...David J. Nordloh Duke University Press 2010 Foreword This 46th annual volume in a series stretching back to AmLS 1963, published in 1965, is also the 12th volume I have edited. I was about to congratulate myself on my stamina, but then reality and admiration set in. Both...