Capitalization, Titles
Q. My colleagues and I are perplexed by the format of film series titles. According to paragraph 8.186, book series are not italicized. Television series, according to 8.196, are italicized. My inclination is to call the Tolkien adaptations “the Lord of the Rings series,” but to call the Rowling adaptations “the Harry Potter series.” One colleague says both series titles should be roman; another wonders whether both should be italicized. And then there’s the pesky matter of the initial article, which I think modifies series in this case and should not be considered part of the title.
A. Paragraph 8.186 refers to titles of series under which a number of more or less related books, often by different authors, have been published. Our decision to use roman type was made, presumably, so that the titles of these series would not be mistaken for the title of a book itself.
Your two examples are rather different. The Lord of the Rings—in book and movie media—is the name of a single work (often presented in the form of a trilogy), not a series. In the same way, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet is the name of a quartet, not a series. The Raj Quartet is a book—a book in four books. The Jewel in the Crown is the name of Granada television’s multiepisode adaptation of The Raj Quartet. Phoenix Fiction, on the other hand, is a number of books (including The Raj Quartet) published by the series editors for Phoenix Fiction. These books are only loosely related (in this case, they are republications of often overlooked or out-of-print novelists), and to italicize Phoenix Fiction would give the false indication of a single coherent work of some sort.
Harry Potter is both the protagonist and part of each of the titles in the series so far. Harry Potter, as a name, characterizes the Harry Potter series. To write “Harry Potter series” might indicate that there’s some sort of work out there known as Harry Potter, which, as far as I know, is inaccurate.
This is all a long way of saying I agree with you—even down to the “the”: when it’s grammatically convenient, an initial “the” in a title can be subsumed by the surrounding sentence.
