Confessions of an Anthology Editor

Abstract

Let me begin at the outset with a confession: I like to edit anthologies. I find it interesting, even exciting. I've edited quite a few: four have been published to date and I'm presently working on a fifth possibly a multi-volume work (an issue to which I will return shortly). Each has been a different sort of collection. Some have been entirely my creation; others have been co-edited with a colleague. Some have been entirely under my control; others have been made to fit constraints imposed by a publisher concerned with marketability issues. Most have been motivated by what I'd call pedagogical concerns, although all have been informed by intellectual or scholarly concerns in a way that I hope problematizes the overly simplistic pedagogy/ scholarship binary. In the following pages, I'd like to recount my intentions with each of the anthologies I've edited, as well as some of the questions I'm wrestling with concerning my current, and biggest, anthology project. In so doing, I hope to expose some of the functions that an anthology might serve and some of the factors that a good anthologizer must consider. I hope also to show what I might venture to call the attributes of editorial intelligence, attributes that to some degree overlap but in other respects do and should differ from what might be called authorial intelligence.