(Re)Reading Encyclopedic Narratives in the Digital Age: An Introduction

“Encyclopedic narrative” is one of these terms and concepts that developed lives of their own after their initial formulation, so much so that term and concept have come to actually diverge quite significantly– sometimes due to a legitimate process of revision and amendment, sometimes because of a certain theoreticalsloppinessthatlargelygoesbyconnotationmorethananythingelse. (“Confessional poetry” is a generic marker that similarly shifted in usage and meaning.) We do not mean to suggest that initial definitions are better than their revisions, because they often aren’t, but we see both a deterioration along side the concretization of the concept after Edward Mendelson introduced it in two significant essays in 1976. In the fifty years since that publication, critics have continuously interrogated the usefulness of Mendelson’s concept, and it is testament to both its relevance and its flexibility that the concept has not yet been rejected to the point where such interrogations would be moot. At the same time, the usage of that concept has shifted so much that today’s readers who go back to Mendelson may be surprised that its origin is quite different from the meanings with which they are familiar.