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July 02, 2008
A Classic Year 15.2: Order of the Works
Back at the beginning of this year, when I started working my way through the entries in Jane Gleeson-White's Australian Classics I mentioned that I was unsure of how she had arranged them in order. They didn't seem to have been listed by publication date, nor was there any alternation of form - novel then poem then story then... and so on. So I was a bit stumped until I saw that Gleeson-White had included, on her contents list, the dates of birth and death of the first third of the entries.
And there it was. The works are listed in order of the author's birth. Which is a strange way to do things. Publication order I can understand, but birthdate seems a little odd.
I can see that publication date might cause a few problems, especially when a work has been revised a number of times over an extended period - do you chose the first or most recent date? - but I think it would provide a view of the development of Australina literature over the 135 years or so since the first publication of For the Term of His Natural Life.
I'm quibbling again. Lists of this sort always seem to bring it out in me.
Posted by larrikin at July 2, 2008 10:35 AM
Comments
A legitimate quibble, I think. What about authors who begin writing late in life? Mart Wesley springs to mind, but I'm sure there are Australian authors who began their careers at a similar age. I think it distorts the history of Australian literature to use birthdate as a chronology.
Mind you, choosing a publication date is not just a matter of which revision. His Natural Life was first published in a journal, like Dickens' novels were...
Posted by: Lisa Hill at July 2, 2008 10:47 AM
Date of birth order is probably the most usual ordering for anthologies. I've done two for OUP and this was the instruction, both times. (Editors and compilers almost never get to make this decision.)
You are spot on in your speculations about date of publication; there can be endless complications about this, as with one example I can think of where the anthology item was first published as a short story in an international magazine, then published in a substantially altered form in a collection of the author's short stories, and finally published yet again as the opening chapter of a book, again in substantially altered form. All in different years.
The advantage of date-of-publication ordering is an intellectual one: the reader can spot or deduce trends from year to year and decade to decade, and map the literature onto the history. This becomes very important in Australian literary history when you look at the writing/publshing explosion, especially in fiction, in the 1980s and the profound effect that second-wave feminism had on what women wrote, what women (and men) read, and what got published.
I'm currently working on the sixth anthology I've edited or been involved in editing/introducing, and all but one used the date-of-birth method -- and the exception was a Coast to Coast where the whole point of the anthology was that everything in it was published in the same year (1986).
It's partly a matter of what's considered the 'unit' of an item included in an anthology, although this very rarely gets articulated. If one orders contents by date of publication, it means, or implies, that the primary focus is on the work. If it's done by birth order of author, it immediately shifts the implicit primary focus onto the artist.
Posted by: Kerryn at July 2, 2008 11:56 AM