Complete works

For other uses, see Complete works (disambiguation).

The complete works of an artist, writer, musician, group, etc., is a collection of all of their cultural works. For example, Complete Works of Shakespeare is an edition containing all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. A Complete Works published edition of a text corpus is normally accompanied with additional information and critical apparatus. It may include notes, introduction, a biographical sketch, and may pay attention to textual variants.

Title page from a 1739 volume of the Opera Omnia of Bernardino Ramazzini

Similarly, the term body of work may be used to describe the entirety of the creative or academic output produced by a particular individual or unit.

Terminology

Complete works may be titled by a single word, "Works".^[1] "Collected works" is often treated as a synonym. A distinction began to be seen clearly in the second half of the 18th century.^[2]

The Latin language equivalent Opera Omnia is still used in English, for example, to refer to the works of Galen or Leonhard Euler.^[3][4] German usage distinguishes de:Gesamtwerk as a complete corpus, de:Gesamtausgabe for a published edition of the works, and Gesammelte Werke or collected works that may be selective in some way. A contrasting term is "selected works", which is a collection of works chosen according to some criterion, e.g., by prominence, or as a representative selection.

Examples

• The first literary author to have "complete works" published, in the modern sense, has been identified as Gerbrand Adriaenszoon Bredero, in 1637/8.^[2]
• The first critical complete edition of a musical composer's works has been identified as Joh. Seb. Bach's Werke (of Johann Sebastian Bach) published 1851 to 1926 by the Bach Gesellschaft at Leipzig, in 46 volumes.^[5]
• The Opera Omnia Leonhard Euler, a compilation of the works of the mathematician Leonhard Euler, began publication in 1911 and volumes were still being compiled for publication as of 2022^[update].^[4][6]
• The Iwanami Shoten complete works of Natsume Sōseki, new edition, set up a Japanese model for complete works of other authors.^[7]