Michael O'Neill, ed., Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. ISBN: 0198711204 (hardback); 0198711204 (paperback). Price: £40 / US$79 (hardback); £14.99 / US$24.95 (paperback).

This is an excellent bibliography of mostly post-1970 criticism of romantic period writing. It is also a necessary one. As our understanding of romanticism (and romanticisms) has undergone one revolution after another, the need for a reliable guide to the variety and volume of new work being published has never been felt more keenly. This book fills that role: with 18 separate chapters on diverse subjects ('Wordsworth', 'Clare', 'Romantic Gothic' and so on), each offering an assessment of current criticism and a full listing of relevant works, this book will be an indispensable tool for anyone working in the period. 'Tool' is the operative word. Bibliographies, unlike, say, novels or even monographs, are not the sort of book one actually reads. They are not after all about literature, even in the widest sense of the term, but about what has been written about literature (which, incidentally, puts this review at an alarming four removes from reality). Bibliographies sit idly on the shelf day after day until the moment when suddenly they are required to perform one vital task, easily, reliably, authoritatively. The point is functionality. We come with specific questions and we look for specific paths to the answers: the latest opinion, the most authoritative account or the current state of debate, all of which lie outside the bibliography proper. On all these practical matters, Literature of the Romantic Period ably delivers. There is comprehensive coverage of the best writing on the period along with detailed summaries and commentaries by leading scholars. The novice is quickly guided to the most lucid and most influential work on a given topic. Though not of course up to date—for material published after 1998 one will have to refer to The Year's Work in English Studies or to the new Annotated Bibliography of English Studies—Literature of the Romantic Period does spot trends and anticipate new shifts in critical interests. What is particularly interesting about the book, in fact, is how far it exceeds its own functionalist aims. The summaries and commentaries themselves implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) pass judgement on current opinion and, taken together, they provide a revealing snapshot of contemporary critical discourse about romantic period literature. The first thing that strikes one about the book is the range. Fifteen years ago, the big six male poets enjoyed lavish attention in the fourth edition of Frank Jordan's volume The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism, taking up most of the book's 600 or so pages. In O'Neill's volume, they are dispatched in six neat chapters at the beginning, which together make up only one third of whole. This leaves plenty of room for the others. There are chapters on general studies of the period, Clare, women poets, Scott, Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Romantic fiction, the gothic, and the essayists—in the main much more generous than one would have seen even ten years ago. In addition, less predictably perhaps, there are chapters for the minor male poets, Peacock, and political prose. Each of these chapters is written by a different specialist who offers a brief overview of the subject, discusses the standard primary texts, surveys the best criticism and then lists references. All of the contributions are useful in this respect, but a number stand out for offering something more than just summary. The chapters on Clare (P.M.S. Dawson), the minor male poets (Michael Rossington), Scott (Fiona Robertson) and Austen (Fiona Stafford) go beyond the call of duty by including excellent accounts of reception history for the writers concerned. Their accounts are interesting even for the non-specialist. Other chapters …