when Spoiler see all this, ain't he must bawl 'area of darkness', with V.S. Nightfall? 
Derek Walcott 
Compiling anthologies can possibly be explained as a response to the challenge to put together the bare minimum needed to ensure basic understanding of an area of writing, assuming the reader is stranded on some desert island. They should be portable yet all-encompassing. The more ambitious they are the less likely they are to succeed. They are necessarily obsolete since the shipwrecked reader, when rescued, will wish to go beyond the samples offered by the anthology. Success is not expected of anthologies but they should try to fail in an acceptable fashion.