Guides are bossy, companions are matey. Guides point, companions nudge. Guides tell you to get a move on, companions let you have a lie in. It is a dodgy polarisation, maybe, but it doesn't over-exaggerate a genuine distinction. Guides harry you along the straight and narrow. Companions let you stop for a chat and a brew-up. Guides march. Companions dance. Not that the Oxford Companion to English Literature is a knees-up. Far from it. But a hint of decorous auntly capering still informs its chopsy, rubber-necking progress down the road from Aaron's Rod to Zwingli, Ulrich. Scholarly, lively and accessible, it was always going to be a bestseller and the first version, edited by Sir Paul Harvey in 1932, went through four editions. The fifth, considerably revised by Margaret Drabble, appeared in 1985 and was revised again in 1995. The present edition, still under Drabble's able editorship, includes enough further revisions and modifications to justify calling it a new volume.

Inevitably, the years have brought both expansion and contraction. By 1985, Harvey's original 866 pages had grown to 1,155 and included a number of appendices featuring the history of censorship and the law of the press, the history of English copyright, and a calendar giving dates of moveable feasts and saints' days since 1066. There was even a detailed table showing the Day Of The Week On Which The First Of Each Month Falls According To The Dominical Letter Of The Year, a sort of literary equivalent of the device For Getting Stones Out Of Horses' Hooves. However, most such treasures have now gone, to be replaced by slightly numbing lists of poets laureate, an honours board of literary awards and their winners, and a snazzy chronology going back 1,000 years, juxtaposing "Principal literary works" with a selection of lamely termed "Other events".

Thus, it is chastening to note that the literary annus mirabilis of 1917, which produced T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations as well as W. B. Yeats's The Wild Swans at Coole , also generated entries as dispiriting as "Edward Thomas d., Battle of Paschendaele; Russian Revolution". The Companion 's inaugural year, 1932, burgeons no less bleakly with "Lytton Strachey d., Kenneth Grahame d.", while the dread pronouncement " Scrutiny started" adds its own, distinctly dying fall. Rather more heartening in the circumstances are 15 new feature articles covering areas such as structuralism, biography, black British literature, postcolonial literature, and children's literature.

Lucidly written, highly informative, with plenty of cross-referencing and accurate bibliographical information, most turn out to be gems of compression. Misleading emphases nonetheless creep in. To claim, at the end of the structuralism essay that "it could be argued that poststructuralism is merely a revision and refinement of structuralism and that structuralism continues to provide the basis for poststructuralist forms of analysis" is seriously to underestimate poststructuralism's disintegrative capacity. Far from being an "extension" of structuralism, poststructuralism denies its first principles. Indeed, poststructuralism's raison d'¨ºtre lies in its commitment to undermine the very presuppositions that produce the notion of a grounding "basis". The absence of a separate essay on it (or indeed on deconstruction) compounds the confusion, betraying an underlying, and very British preference for a comfy kind of sequential ordering. Specific essays on Derrida (oddly discussed only under structuralism and, even more oddly, under "Marxist literary criticism") and on Foucault (similarly relegated) might have helped achieve a more precise sense of where this particular debate is located. In their absence, the result is a touch off-message, as we poststructuralists deftly put it.

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Of course, this sort of selective whingeing is not really fair, but it is permitted under the rules of a number of wonderfully unjust reviewers' games traditionally played on these occasions. "Who's in, who's out?" is one of them. If "English" includes, as it must, non-English writers writing in the language, then it is perfectly reasonable to have entries on Philip Roth, John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer and William Faulkner. But why no James Jones, William Styron or John Horne Burns? If Adrian Henri and Philip Hobsbaum are in, why are Graham Swift, Irvine Welsh, Bernice Rubens, Walter Allen, Pat Barker and Roy Fisher (except, misleadingly, under "Jazz poetry") not? The fairly obscure poetical movement called "new apocalypse" is mentioned, but the widely influential critical stances of new historicism and cultural materialism are not. Harold Bloom's well-merited absence may wring few withers, but the exclusion of Germaine Greer, Karl Miller, Christopher Ricks and Marshall McLuhan must give pause. Plenty of influential foreign writers quite properly find a place: De Maupassant, Milan Kundera, Giuseppe Ungaretti. But the precise contribution to the annals of English literature made by Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin remains unrevealed. And who is this, making a final territorial demand on page 463? None other than Hitler, Adolf. OK, Mein Kampf has a compelling plot, but it still looks a bit short on character development.

Mind you, we are not dealing with a mere book here. By now The Oxford Companion to English Literature ranks with such works as The Oxford English Dictionary , The Victoria County History and The Dictionary of National Biography as monuments whose ultimate purpose was the reinforcement of a 19th-century sense of national heritage seen in terms of "Englishness". But what is currently afoot in the world, with English expanding and England diminishing (the country doesn't even have its own parliament) makes for an altogether stranger context.

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As any teacher knows, English literature now inhabits a disconcerting terra incognita : a shell-pitted, mine-strewn, curiously contoured battlefield, where wraiths wander, ghosts glide. Neat ending, Adolf! Shame about the reviews. Guides cannot hope to be adequate in such circumstances. What is needed are splints, bandages, the helping hand, the cup of tea, the occasional chance for what your mother used to call a nice lie down. It is what companions are for. Happily, this volume still does the business like a good 'un. Oh, all right then. It's the best.

Terence Hawkes is a professor of English, University of Cardiff.