Based on the vastly popular Fifth Edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer, this indispensable volume offers over five thousand alphabetically arranged entries on individual novels, plays, songs, poems, novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, historians, fictional characters, literary movements, legends, and much more. Like its parent volume, this abridgement features useful plot summaries, separate entries on important fictional characters, and countless biographical articles on authors and other influential figures in the world of letters, all presented with the same lightness of touch that has made the original work such a pleasure to read. Fully revised and updated with sixty new entries on contemporary writers including Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, W. Robertson Davies, P.D. James, Toni Morison, and Jeanette Winterson, this edition also includes new appendices listing the winners of the Nobel, Booker, and Pulitzer prizes. It covers topics once regarded as non-literary—detective stories, science fiction, children's stories, and comic strips among them—as well as important movements and critical theories, including the latest developments in Freudian and Marxist criticism. With generous coverage of literature from around the world, entries on literary movements, critics, and critical theories, updated information on modern authors and works, and several entirely new essays on a number of topics such as parody, anachronism, autobiography, heroic drama, and foreign influences on English literature, this is a book that readers will find indispensable.