Companionate

Now that I've relinquished my temporarily peripatetic existence (a bit of home renovation necessitating my exit), I'm back to work on my two companion articles--one at the formatting phase (as in, I've been formatting and reformatting it for hours on end), one at the writing phase.  This led me to look back at the last time I wrote about literary companions, which, by some coincidence, turns out to have been a decade ago.  ("Back in the dawn of blogging time...")  It seems to me that there are now even more publishers attempting to muscle in on the companion business, fighting Oxford and, in particular, Cambridge for market share.  My completely unsubstantiated hypothesis about the phenomenon of companions, companions everywhere, has something to do with the United Kingdom's Research Excellence Framework: that assessment system's requirements for "outputs" appears to drive the appearance of not only companions (home to many articles), but also edited collections and conference proceedings.  (It would be interesting to see a comparative study of UK publishers bringing out conference proceedings vs. North American ones.)  That is to say, scholarly genres compatible with producing the required number of outputs (four). 

After spending yet more time writing for companions, some other aspects of the form jump out at me:

1) The demand for uniformity.  Companions are frequently designed to maximize the resemblances amongst all their essays in terms of method and structure. 

2) Restricted citations.  I've encountered works cited maximums on more than one occasion, whether directly (e.g., no more than twenty-five or thirty sources) or as a side effect (the works cited page included in the word count maximum).  This has begun to trouble me a bit: I appreciate that the guidelines prevent multiplying citations to the point of confusing students, but it also means that, in practice, important works of scholarship may have to be shafted if more than one person has written on the same topic. 

3) Who is the audience? The answer to this question remains murky.  Astronomical prices mean that most companions will never find their way into anyone's personal library (or even, depending on the university library's funding, into a higher ed library).  Cambridge tends to make their books accessible enough, price-wise, for classroom use, but such courtesy cannot be counted on.  Moreover, some companions appear to be pitched too "high," scholarship-wise, for students, yet too low for academics.  Negotiating the audience problem can be fairly tricky, especially if the topic is on the esoteric side.