From History Dissertation to Book - What to do about the Introduction?

by LHistoire1985

Hi all,

so I am currently revising my doctoral dissertation in the field of history into a book and the most difficult part to revise/rewrite is the introduction.

My original introduction is the typical dissertation introduction with a long literature review that tries to cover every remotely relevant piece of scholarship. I know that this literature review part has to be shrunk for the book. That also seems to be what most people I have shown my intro to think. However, I am unsure how to go about that, as I also don't want to be criticized for not covering this or that book properly but dont know how to cut the intro without risking that:

  1. One thing people have suggested to me is to simply move parts of the literature review to footnotes/end-notes and only give groups of literature a sentence or two in the main text. That would mean though that I have to summarize groups of literature in a sentence of two in the main text instead of giving each book/article a sentence in the main text. In my view, that almost inevitably leads to generalizing/misrepresenting of groups of literature. Moreover, this obviously leads to very long footnotes/end-notes.

  2. Something else that seems obvious is that I simply cover less literature. In my dissertation, I would track down even the most remote piece of scholarship, which, I guess, is not all that important to include in the literature review. But is it okay to just leave out works that are only remotely relevant and not cover all the relevant literature? I am just afraid that in this case the book will be criticized for not acknowledging all the relevant literature. This is especially so as at least theoretically people could go and compare the lit review in the dissertation with that in the book and criticize me for not including all relevant books I mention in my dissertation.

So I am still quite unsure as to how to go about revising the introduction. I guess, at a deeper level, this also is about my understanding of how academic writing should work. For the thesis, I was told that I should try to find and acknowledge all relevant literature in the introduction and show how that scholarship is different from mine. Is that not necessary anymore for the book?

crrpit

I don't know how useful my advice is, as I'm roughly in the same position. But the way I thought about it was along these lines:

  1. The PhD is about proving to a (very) small number of specialists that you belong in the field. It's not written for a bigger audience than that. As such, box-ticking is useful, to show that you've done the work, and isn't going to alienate a non-existent audience.
  2. A book is, in theory, written for a larger audience. You absolutely need to justify to them why they should be reading it (or buying it even), but you don't need to tick boxes for the hell of it, because the fact that it is being published already indicates that you are part of the field, and don't need to keep proving it to people. You do however need to make sure that your book is intellectually self-contained - that is, you are introducing all the concepts, ideas, theories, previous scholarship that a reader needs to know to make sense of what you are doing in the book. But if it's not important for understanding your work, then why are you making them read it?
  3. You have, at this stage of your career, presumably read more than one scholarly monograph. Whose introductions have you enjoyed/hated and why? What can you emulate/shamelessly borrow from? What didn't work, and should be avoided?