I made a comment on this forum that I wanted to release my short stories as an anthology, but was informed that an anthology was only with multiple authors. And now I'm ready to put a title on this batch of shorts, and wondered if I could still call it anthology. Here are some grabs from the web. What say you? Your Dictionary.... The definition of an anthology is a book with many writings by only one author. An example of an anthology is a book that contains many of Shakespeare's plays. A published collection of poems, stories, songs, excerpts, etc. An anthology is a collection of selected writings by various authors, and usually, the several stories or writings are in the same literary form, of the same period, or on the same theme. Alternatively, it can also be a collection of selected writings by one author. India Press Blog.
I don't know what Your Dictionary is, but that doesn't sound right to me.I always understood anthology to mean multiple authors contributing to the same book, but a little searching shows that nobody seems to know which it is.
I believe that an anthology can technically be used to describe either a collection of short works by different authors or a collection of short works by a single author. However, if you check out short story collections on Amazon, anthology is mostly used to refer to collections by different authors. Single author collections use some different title formats. Adding ':stories' to the title or 'stories' as a subtitle is one of the most common. Some use subtitles like '12 Christmas stories' or 'tales from ____', or use the format 'title of one of the short stories and other stories'. Some just have a normal title with the fact that it is a collection of short stories at the top of the blurb.
Anthology is multiple authors. A "collection" is one author. I don't think it's a hard rule or anything but it's the expectation.
An anthology just means a selection of different works. It certainly doesn't have to be from different authors, it can be all from one writer. The reason it isn't a "collection" is because it isn't only one type. So, it would be a "collection" of essays, poems etc. but if the works selected are essays, poems, short stories etc it's an "anthology".
I wish to politely disagree. Certainly in British English, this is absolutely not the case, nor the expectation.
