What’s an anthology?

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An anthology, from the Greek meaning “a collection of flowers,” is a collection of literature, media, or music and may include essays, songs, poems, television programs, films, dramas, and short stories. The most common type of anthology is the literary one, often used in education. Most of these anthologies are compiled by a publisher who chooses pieces of literature from other sources to publish in a book for a specific purpose. For example, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature is a collection of writings by African American authors spanning 250 years of American culture and history. This type of text would be commonly used in a college literature class.

Early literary anthologies focused on poetry and can be traced back to the Greeks as far back as the 1st century BC. A current literary anthology usually revolves around a specific genre or time period in literary culture such as American literature written before the Civil War or Chinese-American literature. Some anthologies revolve around a certain type of writing such as essays, poems, plays, or short stories, but many include examples of each to define the entirety of a literary period or genre.

A music anthology is often a collection of the most popular songs by a composer, singer or group. The Beatles Anthology would be an example of this type of collection. Another type of music anthology can be compiled for the purpose of music analysis. For example, you may want to collect only women’s musical compositions and study their uses, history, similarities and contrasts. The trend of music collections became popular in the 16th century, sometimes with a special emphasis on an individual or event, such as accession to the throne.

Additionally, an anthology can combine pieces of media such as television or film. For example, one could combine influential film noir films or selected episodes of popular 1980s sitcoms into a collection and release them on a DVD.

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