The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature ... - uogenglish

Editor’s Preface
viii |
cessors — the development and proliferation of electronic
bibliographical resources. These have had an immense
impact on the new edition, and have presented some interesting
problems. On the one hand they have provided
immediate access to catalogues and bibliographies worldwide.
On the other, the same catalogues have thrown up
evidence which is contradictory, unclear, or in other ways
problematic. A perennial trouble spot in nineteenthcentury
bibliography, the difficulty of distinguishing a new
edition from a new impression, a distinction not easy to
make from an examination of the books themselves, has
been exacerbated by electronic catalogues. So too has the
difficulty of determining the status of American ‘editions’,
another feature of nineteenth-century publishing. Printed
catalogues are not free from error, and their increased accessibility
has compounded the possibility of perpetuating
mistakes. Every effort has been made by contributors to
verify the details of a particular edition or impression by
physical examination where possible. This of course is a
counsel of perfection, and not all contributors have had
access to extensive collections of primary materials. But all
have been aware of the need for caution where conflicting
or uncorroborated dates have existed.
The proliferation of reviews and magazines and the
emergence of a reviewing culture of vast proportions and
variety distinguished the nineteenth-century literary world
from its predecessors. The fruits of several decades of
scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals and literary
reviewing are evident in this edition of the Bibliography,
particularly through the inclusion of extensive listings of
contemporary reviews of individual works and where
possible the identification of the reviewers.
CBEL is an author-based bibliography. The focus of this
volume is on authors who flourished between 1800 and
1900, who were native to, or resident in the British Isles, and
whose main body of work appeared before 1900. Scottish,
Welsh and Irish writers in English have not been allocated
separate sections but rather are integrated into the major
divisions of the Bibliography. No attempt has been made to
standardize entries in terms of the amount of bibliographical
detail provided. This varies according to the state of
knowledge of the subject, and sometimes according to the
emphasis chosen by the contributor. In the case of some
entries, the emphasis is on translations. In others the focus
is on contemporary responses, the posthumous history of
texts, or textual criticism. For less well-known authors the
task has been the more straightforward one of compiling in
the first instance a full and accurate listing of primary
works.
General arrangement
Authors are located within the genre or subject section in
which the predominant portion of their work was
published, or with which they are most closely identified.
Cross-references to these main entries are provided in other
sections, and an extensive system of cross-referencing is in
operation throughout the volume. The organization of the
Bibliography is chronological. In the sections devoted to
poetry, the novel, drama and non-fictional prose, the period
1800–1900 has been sub-divided into three parts: early nineteenth
century (1800–1835); mid nineteenth century
(1835–1870) and late nineteenth century (1870–1900). The
purpose of these divisions is to provide contextualization,
and to avoid unwieldy alphabetical lists. Authors are
assigned to these sections by date of birth. To be included
in the ‘early’ division, an author normally must have been
born between 1760 and 1800. The mid-nineteenth-century
sections include those writers born after 1799 and before
1831, and the late period those born between 1830 and 1865,
whose more important works were written before 1900.
Date of birth normally determines inclusion in a particular
volume of the Bibliography so that William Blake (b.1757)
and William Godwin (b.1756), to name two writers who
might have been expected to appear in this volume, are to
be found in the preceding one, and Yeats (b.1865) and Synge
(b.1871) in the following one. The entry for George Bernard
Shaw (b. 1856) no longer appears in the nineteenth-century
volume, as it can be convincingly argued that his most
significant work was published after 1900.
Style of entries
Author entries are divided into two sections. The first is
devoted to primary material (works by the author), and the
second to secondary materials (works about the author), the
latter selected in accordance with carefully defined principles.
The emphasis is on primary material. A full author
entry contains an opening note giving details of the location
of major collections of manuscripts. This is followed
by a list of any existing bibliographies and reference works
dealing with both primary and secondary materials, and by
details of collections and selections of works. The focus of
the entry is a chronological list of individual works,
arranged by date of first publication. These include all
significant English language editions, and where known,
American and continental editions, followed by contemporary
reviews of the work and translations into other
languages. Individual works may include contributions to
periodicals and to collaborative works, letters, journals,
diaries, notebooks, translations, prefaces, and introductions
by the author, works written under pseudonyms, attributed
or spurious works.
Secondary material, listed in the second section of the
entries, has been assembled according to more selective
principles than in the two previous editions. The availability
of comprehensive bibliographies of secondary material,
both in electronic and volume form, and the backdating
to 1920 of two major bibliographies, the Annual
Bibliography of English Language and Literature and the
Annotated Bibliography of English Studies, made it clear
that it would be an unnecessary duplication for the third
edition of CBEL to provide a selective list of secondary criticism
for each author, as had previously been the case.
Secondary material in this edition, therefore, falls into
three categories: (1) A selective listing of pre-1920 criticism
which can fairly be claimed to have contributed signally to
the establishment or revaluation of the writer concerned.