What happens when the marketing managers of academic publishing meet up with the partisans of radical multiculturalism? One result is the new Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries, surely among the most cynically spurious volumes to have rolled off a university press in recent years. Edited by T. V. F. Brogan, a co-editor of the latest edition of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the Handbook is a compilation of articles from that venerable reference work, repackaged to appeal to the multi-culti, politically correct market. What seems to have happened is this: noticing that the Encyclopedia was selling rather well, someone had the inspired idea of peddling the same thing twice—simply dress it up in native garb, plaster the word “multicultural” on the cover, and presto! another $45 per volume ($17.95 in paper). Mr. Brogan says the editors of the Encyclopedia discerned a “ne ...

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