Overwhelmed by romance, and lost for words

In a move that highlights the acute self-consciousness of literary studies today, Chaucer: An Oxford Guide includes an essay that worries about the function and future of its own genre. The term "guide", Peter Brown tells us in "Chaucer and his guides", has recently eclipsed "companion" and "introduction" because "publishers favour its aura of authority, and the implication that it will provide purposeful direction, a rich fund of relevant and helpful knowledge and a communicative mode of address carefully attuned to its intended audience". But purposeful direction is hard to provide when the sheer bulk of the guide, comprising dozens of essays by diverse hands, makes it impossible to read from cover to cover and viable only as a reference book, to be dipped in to as need dictates. The fact that the Oxford guide to Chaucer threatens, as Brown remarks, to dwarf Chaucer's entire poetic output counts for little, however, with publishers constrained to produce "compendious volumes of multi-authored essays easily dismembered into smaller units for electronic delivery".

All three of the guides under review display the same conflict between the dream of complete coverage by a one-stop compendium and the intractable reality of a subject that refuses to recognise boundaries or conform to a clear-cut agenda. Considered as an anthology of discrete, original essays on cognate topics by experts in the field, each volume is unquestionably impressive and an obligatory purchase not only for libraries, but also for undergraduates, graduates and lecturers who specialise in its area of study. Considered as conspectuses of their subjects, however, these books leave the reader disconcerted, if not dispirited, by the aimless eclecticism in which the discipline in general is languishing. Never has the idea of criticism as the "common pursuit" T.S. Eliot once envisaged seemed more remote.

The editor's aim in Literary Theory and Criticism is not to offer students "overwhelmed and bemused" by the plethora of approaches available yet another "pick-and-mix assortment of ideas and writers" whose connections with each other remain unclarified. To this end, the book is split into four sections: the first contains essays on such topics as mimesis, value and authorship; the second tackles 20th-century titans such as F. R. Leavis and Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as major critical schools, including "new criticism", the Frankfurt School and cultural studies; the third surveys the Babel of theories currently competing for students' allegiance; and the last peeps into a future that may find trauma theory, ecocriticism and cognitive literary analysis added to the ever-expanding menu of critical methods.

Swallowing that menu whole is a recipe for intellectual indigestion. Even an editor as adept as Patricia Waugh, whose introductory overview is superb, is doomed to be defeated by the quest for cohesion. The guide's encyclopaedic ambition, and the consumerist creed of choice it serves, makes comparative evaluation of the critical options and the construction of a cogent perspective on them impossible.

The trick is, therefore, to treat the book as the pick-and-mix enterprise it repudiates. The quality of the essays is consistently high, with outstanding contributions by Timothy Clark on hermeneutics, Chris Baldick on criticism and the academy, Chris Snipp-Walmsley on postmodernism, and S an Burke on the responsibilities of the writer. Only the essays on historicism and Lacanian criticism depart from the standard of clarity observed by the rest of the contributors. The former is impenetrably cryptic in conception, while the latter indulges in what William Empson dubbed "the sloven's pomp of evasive jargon", which has bred widespread disenchantment with theory during the past decade.

To dwell too long in the empyrean of high theory is to feel the force of William Blake's warning that "to generalise is to be an idiot".

Unfortunately, any hopes one might have that guides focused on Chaucer and Romanticism would afford secure anchorage in writers and their works are soon dashed. Both books include sections that supply close readings of particular texts. But these readings, invariably accomplished though they are, are obliged by the brief of the blockbuster guide to illustrate the wealth of approaches confronting the punter, instead of letting each work elicit the unpredictable response it demands.

Topics and theories rather than texts call the shots, save where historical context cracks the whip and books are displaced by their backgrounds. Thus the "Readings" section of the Chaucer guide gives us, among other things, a carnivalesque Chaucer, a post-colonial Chaucer and a Chaucer empowered by "the touch of the modern queer critic" to "reveal the perversion at the heart of the orthodox". The structure of the volume, however, gives priority to Chaucer's historical and literary contexts, which hog more than half the contents. These put any pretensions to primacy that The Canterbury Tales or Troilus and Criseyde might have cherished firmly in their place.

The inherent interest of the 19 chapters on everything from nationhood, chivalry and science to the classical, French and biblical backgrounds of the poems is not in dispute. What rankles is the assumption that the acquisition of such knowledge should precede our encounter with the poems, which can cope without the crutch of extraneous scholarship.

It is doubtless churlish to carp at books that are no guiltier than the rest of the discipline of falling under the baleful spell of cultural historicism. As Kenneth Johnston observes in his astute essay in Romanticism , this approach has arguably become "the dominant ideological formation among current literary methods" and is certainly "the dominant procedure for studying British Romantic literature in the Anglo-American academy". Through a deft analysis of Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey , Johnston shows how to let the text take the lead by first establishing " intrinsic grounds for further extrinsic or contextual study", rather than foisting extrinsic information upon the text, whether the text likes it or not.

The kind of criticism Johnston practises, however, runs counter to the omnivorous interdisciplinarity of Romanticism as a whole. Once upon a time, studying the Romantic period basically meant studying the Big Six: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Now it means studying a phenomenon so "diverse, protean, amorphous", as the editor concedes, that it defies definition, and consequently feels free to colonise any realm that takes its fancy.

If you really want to master Romanticism, brace yourself to bone up not only on revolution and empire, but also on the visual arts and music, print culture and the book trade, science, philosophy and religion. You must then pursue your subject beyond England into Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and thence all over Europe and on into the Orient and the Americas. Your next task is to track its progress through all the principal literary genres, provided you take newspapers, travel writing, letters, diaries and biographies on board as well. The guide's final section, "Romantic afterlives", invites you to trace the imprint of Romanticism in our own time, in poetry, novels, film, theatre, politics, science and environmentalism.

Once again, it must be stressed that the calibre of the essays that compose this book could hardly be higher. There are rich pickings to suit every taste, including intriguing reflections on the appeal of footnotes, fragments and forgeries to the Romantic mind. The undeniable virtues of the volume as a resource book are vitiated, however, by its depressing supposition that every topic it embraces is equally deserving of our time and attention, which it patently is not.

None of these three guides, in short, has the nerve to live up to its name.

A guide singles out the sights that count. To be made to go everywhere is not to be guided at all.

Kiernan Ryan is professor of English, Royal Holloway, University of London.