A Garden of Orismological Delights: A Review of the Fifth Edition of J.A. Cuddon’s A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, revised by M.A.R. Habib (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)

Abstract

A Garden of Orismological Delights: A Review of the Fifth Edition of J.A. Cuddon's A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, revised by M.A.R. Habib (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)The publication of the fifth edition of Cuddon's A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by Wiley-Blackwell is a much awaited event, considering the popularity the dictionary has enjoyed. Apart from M.A.R. Habib, the editor who revised the edition, there are four associate editors: Matthew Birchwood, Vedrana Velickovic, Martin Dines and Shanyn Fiske, all of them academics associated with English or American universities. The release of the dictionary must have been a challenge. The fourth edition was published in 1998, which makes this one the first Cuddon dictionary in the twenty-first century.The reader's attention is attracted to etymological explanations (though they are not always present), and a variety of subjects; some defined in a handy, succinct way, others described in miniature essays which often span a broad time context. Apart from respectable-looking derivations from Greek and Latin, there are words of French, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Sanskrit or Old Norse origin, to mention the instances that immediately catch the eye.However, the authors and editors of such gigantic projects always experience both blindness and insight. Cuddon was clearly aware of that, as specified in the preface to the third edition. Did his queries affect the current version? This is what he said: am familiar with Classical, European, Slavonic and Near Eastern literatures and have some knowledge of the literatures of North America and of Commonwealth nations. But my knowledge of Oriental literatures and those of Spanish America and South America is limited. While the statement points to the immense erudition of the late author, my locatedness makes me frown on the juxtaposition of European and Slavonic, as if Slavonic literatures were not a part of Europe. I do not assume Cuddon only meant the Asian territory of Russia. Geographical nuances aside, Slavonic literatures are present in the fifth edition in a very selective way. Probably the involvement of the editor whose roots are in former Yugoslavia accounts for some references to the literature of that part of Europe. There are, of course, references to Russian literature. As for Poland, Henryk Sienkiewicz is mentioned in the entry on historical novel (though his novels can hardly be called an imperialist project, 333). Jerzy Grotowski appears in an entry on Theatre Laboratory, but the widely acclaimed Stanislaw Lem goes unnoticed in the science fiction entry, and so does Jan Kochanowski in the entry on lament, even though his Laments (translated into English by Baranczak and Heaney) remain unique in Renaissance literature. South America continues to be a terra incognita, though gaucho literature has been given a separate entry, while South American writers are mentioned in the discussion of magic realism. Postimperial peripheries, i.e. New Zealand and Australia with the specificity of their fertile indigenous cultures and terms derived from them are not really acknowledged; the same would go for most of Africa. Discussing new additions, M. A. R. Habib mentions terms from Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Indian (vii). It is interesting to see that far from being insular, the field that the dictionary mines has been expanding throughout successive editions and will, hopefully, do so in the future.It is certainly interesting to see the new developments, that is, the entries related to the material advertised on the blurb, namely studies and queer theory, postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, postmodernism, narrative theory, and cultural studies. Surprisingly, the term gender is not given a separate entry to explain how it has been operating, as compared to another key term in the feminist discourse, i.e. sexual difference. While there are interesting entries on particular terms such as abjection and chora, both relating to Kristeva's description of the semiotic, her oeuvre, like that of Irigaray and Cixous, is not given too much attention in the entry on feminist criticism. …