Salem Press

Cyclopedia of Literary Places

Place-setting, location is as central to the study of literature as character. Whole course studies have been designed around it: papers as short as one page and as long as doctoral dissertations have addressed it. Now, librarians, students and teachers have a comprehensive reference source that addresses it. This 3 volume reference set is a title-driven work that analyzes the use of place in literary works.

Similar to Cyclopedia of Literary Characters in concept and format, Cyclopedia of Literary Places contains articles ranging from 300-1,000 words on more than 1,300 literary works taken from the titles covered in Masterplots, Second Revised Edition (1996). Each article provides standard top matter on an individual literary work, followed by entries discussing important real and imaginary places that figure into the work. Emphasis is not so much on the places themselves, but on how they are used as literary devices within the overall work. The 1,300 titles covered in Cyclopedia of Literary Places are selected from the 1,805 titles in Masterplots that best lend themselves to discussion of place: virtually all the novels, most of the plays, and a selection of volumes of poetry. Nonfiction titles are not included. The articles range in length from half-page articles for short stories, most plays, and poetry works, to full-page and longer articles for novels.

This set joins the Masterplots family of literary reference works. It completes the foundation of sources for the three primary approaches to literary criticism: story (Masterplots and Masterplots II), character (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters) and setting. It is organized and presented in a form that will be familiar to users of Salem's Cyclopedia of Literary Characters.

Closely tied to Masterplots and Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, this set is an integral part of the Salem family of literary reference works. While Cyclopedia of Literary Places does not cover every title in Masterplots, every title it does cover has related articles in both Masterplots and Cyclopedia of Literary Characters. For this reason, the articles in this set devote most of their space to discussion of place, leaving most plot and character details to the other reference sets.

Each article in Cyclopedia of Literary Places provides standard top-matter information on an individual literary work: full title, author's name and vital dates, type of work, type of plot, time of plot, and date of original publication. A brief introductory paragraph explains where the work is set and comments on themes and patterns in the work's use of place. Discussions within the entries themselves focus on how places are used as literary devices within the novels, plays, or poems in which they appear. The set's articles contain more than 5,500 separate entries.

The set has also been enriched by the fascinating Introduction written by the British scholar and well-known novelist Brian Stableford.