Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Explore the canon of great writers.

In this incredible volume, English professor Jay Stevenson teaches readers everything they want—and need—to know about English literature. From Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats, to more modern figures like Nabokov, Salinger, Morrison, and Updike, this handy guide also includes information on periods, time frames, every type of criticism, the differences and similarities of the literature on each side of the Atlantic, and more.

—Fascinating, fact-filled writing that explores English literature as it is studied right now
—Terrific supplementary reading for AP English Lit students
—Helps readers explore and study fiction, plays, poems, and prose

Rating : - Too many pieces missing
As a response to my brother's criticism of the Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, I tried to look for a basic overview of the subject that would be much more "balanced" to liberal eyes than the conservative PIG is.

However, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to English Literature" can best be regarded as a disappointment. A guide to English literature of its size ought I think to serve to introduce people to the entire history of English literature and attempt to define it as clearly as possible. Like many other books I have read, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to English Literature" fails in this respect. It is particularly problematic with American literature. Whilst the text proper does not discuss writers from America, the appendices do and this can best be described as ludicrous. The coverage of writers from other English-speaking nations has similar flaws. If you want to mention an Anglo-Indian writer like Salman Rushdie, one ought at least to mention all literature in the English language, no matter where it comes from.

Another problem is the apparent gap in the coverage of English literature during the early twentieth century, where there is a direct movement from circa-1900 modernism to late twentieth-century magic realism as if the literature of the middle twentieth century had no significance (I am anything but an expert, but at least there should have been some explanation if it is insignificant). The remainder of the historical section is covered quite well but could have been given more space.

Also, I find much of the early material discussing writing and how to write literature quite superfluous. Except for specialised genres like science fiction, fantasy and poetry, literature should not require this type of analysis because it is generally based on themes that relate closely to human experience and - again excluding the genres noted above - uses language that most people would understand without a course.

All in all, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to English Literature" is disappointingly superficial and incomplete.