Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 1, April 2003
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Runco, Mark A. and Steven Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity. 2 Vols. London Academic Press, 1999. ISBN 0-12-227075-4 (set); 0-12-227076-2 (Volume 1), 0-12-227077-0 (Volume 2) Vol. 1: pp. xvii, 853; Volume 2: pp. xiii, 810
Reviewed by
This Encyclopedia provides a fascinating survey of past and in particular current approaches in a wide range of academic disciplines. Arranged in alphabetical order, each entry covers a specific topic, such as acting, birth order, dreams and creativity, genetics. There are also biographical entries about a number of people generally considered highly creative. Their lives are charted, and special aspects of their individual creativity highlighted. In some cases, the biographies read like psychiatric case histories, linking in with entries around the controversy of the dark side of creativity, creativity and alcohol or drug abuse, and creativity and psychiatric problems, including genius and madness. Each entry follows the same overall structure: contents headings, definitions of key terms, abstract, main body, and bibliography. The intended audience for the book is ‘students of creativity as well as researchers and professionals who utilize creativity in their work’. The style of the entries is clear, and even highly specialised areas, such as Chaos Theory and Creativity, are easily comprehensible also for the non-specialist.
Browsing through the two volumes, it becomes apparent that current approaches to creativity consider several distinct questions: What are the influences on creativity (form within the creative person, and from outside)? What sparks creative activity (inspiration). What are the characteristics of the creative process? Is creativity related to other characteristics of the human mind and of human behaviour, and if so, how? How can we define, describe and explain creativity? A good cross-referencing system helps to find one’s way across related individual entries. It is particularly interesting to see how different researchers, from different disciplines, approach the same or similar issues in the creativity debate.
At times proof-reading has been too relaxed, giving rise to quite a number of unnecessary typos and at times introducing confusion when, for example, in the context of Jung we read about introvert and intravert in the same paragraph. It is also striking that some entries about specific art forms are not at least co-written by an artist or an academic specialising in that art form, but ‘only’ by a psychologist. However, these are indeed minor deficiencies in the context of the benefit that this encyclopedia undoubtedly brings to its readers.