Introductory chapter and the second book as a genre

I belong to the group of academics writing texts from start to finish. I then typically work on the introduction to ensure that it better corresponds with the text as a whole. However, I’m unable to start anywhere than from the beginning. I need to write a provisional introduction to find my bearings and the right tone. Working on the introduction is an important part of my writing process – even though the actual text itself doesn’t always survive into print.

A few weeks ago, I finished the first version of the introductory chapter for my second book. It ended up being a short text, only nine pages long. I will certainly need to revise it. Perhaps it needs to be expanded. But none of this is possible at this stage. In fact, I don’t yet know exactly what the introductory chapter is an introduction to.

Sure, the structure of my book is there in broad terms. I have crafted a synopsis consisting of eight chapters. I know what these are going to be about and which points I want to make in them. I also know which greater points I want to present in the book as a whole. But exactly how to communicate and underpin everything remains to be seen. To a large extent, this is also a question of in which genre I choose to write and which readers I address. I thus need to make some decisions. 

Second books in the field of history in Sweden can, but don’t have to, be written more or less like a thesis. They may include long sections on theory and methodology, in-depth discussions on sources and extensive reviews of existing research in the field. They may, similar to a German habilitationschrift, be 500 pages long, bursting at the seams with footnotes. The empirical investigation may be thorough, almost total. 

But second books can also be written in a more laid-back fashion. They may focus on the author and a few key arguments. The relationship with previous research and scientific choices can be implicit. This writing style is the ideal in the Anglo-Saxon world. Swedish historians adopting this approach often seek to reach a wider audience. They want to address more people than just their colleagues in the scholarly community. Sometimes, they succeed in doing so. 

I had this kind of ambition already in my PhD thesis. I had been taught an ideal that good scholarship should be able to speak both to the scholarly community and the educated public at the same time. This is an ideal I still support, at least intuitively and emotionally. What else would be the purpose of the discipline of history for society? 

However, my experience from the afterlife of my thesis is that it’s quite hard addressing different audiences at the same time. There is a great risk of misunderstandings, both inside and outside academia. This is why I have also been more careful during my postdoc years in terms of what, and for whom, I have written. I’ve been very careful to first and foremost position myself in the academic contexts to which I want to belong. Through essays, popular history articles and public lectures, I have sometimes sought to reach broader audiences. This, however, has not been a primary goal of mine. 

But now that I have once more started to write a monograph, my old ideals are once again the brightest and offer me the most motivation. I think – once again – that I have something important and interesting to say. Something that more people than just historians may benefit from hearing. For those wanting to read me in the full trappings of an academic, there are now many peer-reviewed journal articles available in both Swedish and English. It doesn’t make sense to compile these into a whole that might be published, but which would be impenetrable and uninspired. No, I need to make a new attempt to address several audiences at the same time.

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