An edited volume or edited collection is a collection of scholarly or scientific chapters written by different authors. The chapters in an edited volume are original works (not republished works).
Alternative terms for edited volume are contributed volume, edited collection and multiauthor volume. All these terms emphasize that the book is a collection of chapters contributed by different authors and harmonized by an editor. Edited volumes are of interest in academic publishing because they present different viewpoints and experiences on a common theme.
An edited volume is unlike an anthology, which is a collection of republished short literary works by different authors. It is also not a collected edition, which brings together already-published works by a single author and is edited by a publisher. It is different from a reader, which contains collected texts for learning purposes. Finally, it is different from proceedings, which contain articles written by different authors who present them at a scientific conference.
The editor (or editors, often there are several) of an edited volume is the key figure in conceiving and producing the book. [1] He or she is responsible for determining the book's purpose, structure and style (as laid out in a book proposal); for signing a book contract with an interested publisher; and for selecting the individual contributors who will write the chapters (and possibly the foreword). Selecting the contributions may involve an open call for papers or may be conducted privately. The editor is also responsible for keeping the writing process on schedule and serves as the liaison between the publisher and the contributors. [2] However, the task of "chasing contributions" can be substantial. [3]
The editor may also be a contributor to the volume, by writing some chapters (often with other authors) and especially by preparing a preface, an introduction or an afterword summarizing the main points. The editor also carries out the linguistic and substantive editing of the chapters before submitting the book manuscript to the publisher, and coordinates authors' review and correction of the proofs (preprints).
Authors of individual chapters (contributors) sign contributor agreements that outline the topic and length of the chapter they are to write, the deadline for delivery, the copyright policy and the compensation (e.g. copies of the printed book). By accepting to contribute to the volume, they agree to prepare their chapters according to the book's style regarding, for example, the use of headings, illustrations, formatting and other text features.
Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American poet and writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for The Chronicles of Amber. He won the Nebula Award three times and the Hugo Award six times, including two Hugos for novels: the serialized novel ...And Call Me Conrad (1965), subsequently published under the title This Immortal (1966) and then the novel Lord of Light (1967).
In academia, a Festschrift is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the honoree's colleagues, former pupils, and friends. Festschriften are often titled something like Essays in Honour of... or Essays Presented to....
George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet and Christian Congregational minister. He became a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow-writer Lewis Carroll. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology, including several collections of sermons.
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organization, and many other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate and complete piece of work.
A ghostwriter is a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are putatively credited to another person as the author. Celebrities, executives, participants in timely news stories, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, memoirs, magazine articles, or other written material.
Scientific literature encompasses a vast body of academic papers that spans various disciplines within the natural and social sciences. It primarily consists of academic papers that present original empirical research and theoretical contributions. These papers serve as essential sources of knowledge and are commonly referred to simply as "the literature" within specific research fields.
A monograph is a specialist written work or exhibition on one subject or one aspect of a usually scholarly subject, often by a single author or artist. Although a monograph can be created by two or more individuals, its text remains a coherent whole and it keeps being an in-depth academic work that presents original research, analysis, and arguments. As a focused, in-depth and specialised written work in which one or more authors develop a uniform and continuous argument or analysis over the course of the book, a monograph is essentially different from an edited collection of articles. In an edited collection, a number of original and separate scholarly contributions by different authors are edited and compiled into one book by one or more academic editors.
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), alternatively known by the shorter title Lives of the Poets, is a work by Samuel Johnson comprising short biographies and critical appraisals of 52 poets, most of whom lived during the eighteenth century. These were arranged, approximately, by date of death.
Donald Albert Wandrei was an American science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction writer, poet and editor. He was the older brother of science fiction writer and artist Howard Wandrei. He had fourteen stories in Weird Tales, another sixteen in Astounding Stories, plus a few in other magazines including Esquire. Wandrei was the co-founder of the prestigious fantasy/horror publishing house Arkham House.
The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published more than 300 volumes by authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, Frederick Douglass to Ursula K. Le Guin, including selected writing of several U.S. presidents. Anthologies and works containing historical documents, criticism, and journalism are also published. Library of America volumes seek to print authoritative versions of works; include extensive notes, chronologies, and other back matter; and are known for their distinctive physical appearance and characteristics.
The Four Books and Five Classics are authoritative and important books associated with Confucianism, written before 300 BC. They are traditionally believed to have been either written, edited or commented by Confucius or one of his disciples. Starting in the Han dynasty, they became the core of the Chinese classics on which students were tested in the Imperial examination system.
The Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian is a comprehensive thesaurus of the Lithuanian language and one of the most extensive lexicographical works in the world. The 20 volumes encompassing 22,000 pages were published between 1941 and 2002 by the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. An online and a CD version was made available in 2005. It contains about 236,000 headwords, or 500,000 if counting sub-headwords, reflecting modern and historical language both from published texts since the first published book in 1547 until 2001 and recorded from the vernacular. Definitions, usage notes, and examples are given for most words. The entry length varies from one sentence to almost a hundred pages. For example, 46 pages are devoted to 298 different meanings of taisyti and its derivatives.
Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings, and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth. The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps, and inventing languages and names as a private project to create a mythology for England. The earliest story, "The Voyage of Earendel, the Evening Star", is from 1914; he revised and rewrote the legendarium stories for most of his adult life.
The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men comprised ten volumes of Dionysius Lardner's 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846). Aimed at the self-educating middle class, this encyclopedia was written during the 19th-century literary revolution in Britain that encouraged more people to read.
The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, novels, and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), either under his own name or, more usually, under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a prolific writer on topics related to contemporary English society and literary criticism, who has been declared "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture." His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work, but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature.
Jason Vincent Brock is an American author, artist, editor and filmmaker.
The General History of Africa (GHA) is a two-phase project launched by UNESCO in 1964, producing a volume history of Africa first published in 1981 up to the present.
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a documentary editing project dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing online all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime (1809–1865).
Diana Wynne Jones was a British writer of fantasy novels for children and adults. She wrote a small amount of non-fiction.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to books.