ABSTRACT
Volume III of CBEL (1940) devotes its 1100 double-column pages entirely to the nineteenth century. With its Supplement (1957) it covers almost every aspect of the period including the Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Indian, English-Canadian, English-South African, Australian, and New Zealand literatures. Unfortunately it is not free from errors. (The second edition will start with this volume.) A more modest affair is the bibliography (of over 200 pages) attached to The Victorians and After, 1830-1914 by Edith Batho and Bonamy Dobrée (1938). For the major authors the Modern Language Association of America has recently sponsored a “Review of Research” in nineteenth-century English literature, of which 3 volumes have so far appeared—The English Romantic Poets (ed. T. S. Raysor, 1950, rev. 1956), The Victorian Poets (ed. F. J. Faverty, 1956), and The English Romantic Poets and Essayists (ed. C. W. and L. H. Houtchens, 1958). The last item covers Blake, Southey, Campbell, Moore, and Landor, who had been excluded from Volume I (which was restricted to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats), as well as Lamb, Hazlitt, Scott, Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey. The Victorian volume covers Tennyson, the Brownings, FitzGerald, Clough, Arnold, Swinburne, the Rossettis, Morris, Hopkins, and fourteen “Later Victorian Poets” (from Meredith to A. E. Hous-man). The Victorian Novelists (ed. Lionel Stevenson) is announced. Each section is by a separate scholar, but the method—a list of recent editions, books, and articles with appropriate comments—is uniform. An anti-critical bias diminishes 151the value of the series. Lewis Leary’s Contemporary Literary Scholarship (1958) is less comprehensive, but the chapters on “The Romantic Movement” (by R. H. Fogle) and “The Victorian Period” (by L. Stevenson) are useful for authors outside the scope of the MLA series.
