Price 2000

From Commonplace Book
Jump to: navigation, search

Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. Cambridge: UP, 2000. Print.

Introduction

  • Describes her method (on 12) as reception history + narrative theory
  • 1 In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition... to execrate the poetic albums that littered the sofa-tables of the Manchester bourgeoisie.
  • 2 More immediately (given that no argument about Clarissa or Middlemarch can appeal to more than synecdochal evidence), extracts underwrite the discipline of literary criticism as we know it. Like book reviews or film previews, the pages that follow depend on a gentleman's agreement to take the parts of a work for the whole.
  • 3 ...the anthology violates modern readers' expectation that the material unit (the book) should coincide with the verbal unit (the text).
  • At once the voice of authority and a challenge to prevailing models of authorship, the anthology traces its ambiguity to the late eighteenth century, when an organicist theory of the text and a proprietary understanding of authorship gathered force at the same moment as legal and educational changes lent compilers new power.
  • 4 extensive reading as staved off by anthologies
  • Far from replicating the move away from intensive reading [as of a few treasured texts] that its editors registered in the culture at large, the history of the anthology inverts it.
  • The anthology trained readers to pace themselves through an unmanageable bulk of print by sensing when the skip and where to linger. In the process, its editors set an example for the stop-and-start rhythm of reading that made possible new genres like the gothic novel (which punctuated prose narrative with verse epigraphs), life and letters biography (which used narratorial summaries to frame epistolary excerpts), and even the tourist guidebook (which by the 1830s, as James Buzard has shown, came to ornament logistical instructions about the quickest routes with snatches of poetry to recite upon reaching a scenic stopping place).
  • 5 the novel depends...on readers' resistance to those demands [of scale, pace and duration]. Skipping (or anthologizing) and skimming (or abridging) has never been separable from a genre that cracks under its own weight.
  • 6 An anthology piece is not a random sample any more than an abridgment is a scale model... The anthology's ambition to represent a whole through its parts is always undermined by readers' awareness that the parts have been chosen for their difference from those left out.
  • 7 As I'll argue, the novel rose less by challenging esthetic and social hierarchies which had kept it down than by projecting those stratifications onto its own audience. Far from leveling class or gender distinctions [contra Ian Watt]...the novel has internalized and even reinvented them.
  • C18 anthologists chose excerpts for truth, C19 editors for style, but esthetic beauties came to perform the same function that moral "beauties" had earlier filled in the structure of the novels. Both punctuated the narrative, interrupted the time of reading, and force readers to surface periodically from the self-indulgent pleasures of mimesis to a higher, less particularized, more disinterested plane. In that sense, the opposition between fragment and frame cuts across the historical shift from didactic to formalist criticism.
  • 8 The changing techniques that editors have used to compress the bulk of Richardson's novels provide an index to shifting assumptions about the most efficient way to convey information - or indeed about what counts as information at all.
  • 9 Shakespearean editors, too, expanded the audience for a single national poet only by packaging his work in a range of different forms calibrated as finely as the market segments that they called into being.... By the early C19, Susan Ferrier was able to enlist Shakespearean anthology pieces and indeed Sh anthologies in a campaign against solipsistic novel-reading, producing fictions so riddled with hackneyed quotations as to be barely readable today. Her pedantry repels not because its sources are too difficult for modern readers to recognize, but because their facility stops interpretation short. Ferrier's shallow allusiveness tests the limits not only of intertextual reading but of feminist literary-historical revisionism.
  • ...Eliot, more ruthlessly excerpted than any since [really? Not Dickens?]
  • 10 Debates about Eliot's sententiousness reflect reviewers' and critics' growing doubts about the synecdochal logic of their own practice. Eliot's shifting place in the canon over the past hundred years reveals not only evolving assumptions about the structure of literary texts, but changes in the evidentiary value accorded to quotation.
  • The work of professional mediators like editors, condensers, and reviewers figures less often in critical text than in scholarly footnotes - or only, anecdotally, as corruptions that reflect a "horizon of expectations" against which to measure authorial originality. Yet competing editorial alternatives (anthology, abridgment, expurgation, collected works) adds up to more than a series of accidents in the transmission of particular texts. They also shape a larger generic system. Shakespearean editing set a precedent for the power of condensations to scramble genre: anthologies chopped lower literary forms (first the drama, then the novel) into pseudo-lyric snippets as mechanically as abridgments translated verse into quasi-novelistic prose.
  • 11 Pierre Bourdieu's appeal for critics "to make explicit to [themselves] [their] position in the subfield of producers of discourse about art and the contribution of this field to the very existence of the object of study" can be extended from discourse itself to a wider range of nonexpressive practices: all the acts of textual reproduction and omission, contextualization and juxtaposition, which together construct not only a particular literary tradition but a model of what literature is. Discourses are easier to describe than practices, however. Anthologists' silences furnish a more slippery kind of evidence than do theoretical manifestoes.
    • hence reliance on paratext for evidence.

Ch 1 Richardson

  • the constitutive relationship between anthologies/abridgments and novels on a narrative but also paratextual and intellectual property level
  • 13 [assumptions about literature and information underlying anthologizing] Condensations define some modes of discourse as functional, others as decorative.
  • 14 the composite form of Richardson's novels, a collection of multiple documents with a narrative thrust that is ultimately signed by one name
    • dramatizing dangers of appropriating someone else's words
  • 16 As synoptic narrative alternates with synecdochal extracts, each modern abridgment oscillates between the narrative conventions of c18 epistolary fiction and those of c19 omniscient narration.
  • 17-8 Richardson's published paratextual Collection of Moral sentiments highlights the inherent tension between sentiment and story in the full text
  • 22 The repetition of the word "View" (only to story) defines the anti-narrative organization of the Collection as a polemical strategy designed to correct or even punish readers' putative desires. The anthology saves readers from the vice of impatience only by ensuring there is nothing to skip ahead to.
  • 23 ...while each "Epitome" of the novels -- abridgment, table of contents, collection of sentiments, index -- attempts to resolve [24] the tension between story and sentiment by pulling the texts in one direction or another, ultimately they reveal instead the impossibility of composing an anthology devoid of narrative order or a plot that does not crumble into anthology pieces.
  • 35ff the conceptual intellectual property issue of disavowing authorship but asserting the work as his IP
  • 40 Richardson's potential indebtedness to the popular composition manual The Art of English Poetry by Bysshe (also discussed in St Clair 2004)
    • consistency demands taking it seriously as a source along with "full" literary texts
  • 46 using the figure of an executor to lend moral weight to asserting authority while disclaiming authorship
  • 50 If Richardson's peculiar position as an author-printer crystallized the tension between compilation and authority in his novels, his career-long struggle to reconcile documentary authenticity with narrative unity also reflects a larger contradiction inherent in the composite structure of epistolary fiction.
  • fewer new epistolary novels appear after the turn of the c19 but reproduction of old works (cf St Clair 2004 on the old canon of C18 fiction ) makes that decline appear less linear
  • 51 interesting -- Mrs Humphry Ward produced an abridged version of Clarissa in 1868
    • all modern ones use same strategy: 3rd person past tense plot summaries to connect epistolary excerpts, exaggerating a pattern inherent in the novels
  • 51 modern biography narrates like a Victorian novel; Victorian biographies used the composite structure of published collections of correspondence
  • 54 shift in taste away from reading letters as the habit of reading epistolary fiction faded? Or more structural commercial reasons underlying that?
  • 55ff interesting case of Scott's Redgauntlet "historicizinf the epistolary novel" (59)
  • 59 For Ward, epistolary narrative is to "events" what "fancy-work" is to "earnest-work": the letter to the newspaper. Narrative means business. And that prophecy fulfilled itself. Where Ward claimed to respond to modern readers' need for an abridgement like hers, reciprocally such an abridgment interrelated a new kind of impatient, plot oriented reader.
  • 60 really nice paragraph about readers of railway novels
  • 61 Once modern efficiency forbids characters to waste on domestic politics, or writes to waste on epistolary narration, the time that both should be saving for "earnest work," it becomes natural to turn to old novels for the emotional depth that we can no longer enjoy (by bullying our own daughters or sisters in real life ), nor even experience vicariously by reading new novels.
  • 62 Waverley novels "represent past political struggles without re-enacting past literary forms"
    • nice paired with Armstrong 2005: they turn time (past) into space (Scotland)
  • 65 synthetic and eclectic structure of Waverley novels, collecting and creating
    • quoting Robert Crawford

Ch 2 Cultures of the Commonplace

  • how anthology/abridgment forms situate and create readerships; interact with narrative form; and how quotations should be thought of as potentially (e.g.) Shakespeare AND an anthology
  • 67 change to perpetual copyright being illegal in 1774 gave anthologies the "retrospective function (and the academic audience) that they maintain today"
    • this established the content of the canon (more or less) and that anthology pieces "bear a signature and that its signatory be dead" (Ballad anthologies?)
  • hegemony of Vicemius Knox's 1784 Elegant Extracts
  • 68-70 topos of editorial consensus with fame and/or popular taste in positioning anthology contents, "present[ing] the anthology as the effect on an audience's cohesion rather than its cause."
  • 72 The Extracts' bid to replace the classical curriculum of "our fathers" by its equivalent in the "mother tongue" reinforces the feminization of bourgeois culture..."merchants, men of business, and particularly the ladies" write better letters than scholars.
    • an unsuccessful bid presumably, thinking of Tom Tulliver's classical education in The Mill on the Floss (1860) -- though mixed, he has to read excerpted play Douglas (1756) and lines from Speaker (ed Enfield 1803)
  • 74 3 features of anti anthology backlash from 1800 to now: appeals to originality, to organic structure, and to the fear of a mass public
    • 75 also gendered: women (and feminized men) read fragments while men read while works
  • Shakespeare
    • 78 Sh set the first example of genius trumping genre: his plays were admitted to anthologies without opening the floodgates for other dramatists. What he did open the way for, instead, was novelists like George Eliot, whose anthologization a century later did not ennoble the novel so much as reclassify her as a prose poet.
    • Sh turned into maxims and anthology pieces over the C18
    • 79 Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park learning Sh by osmosis, "a part of an Englishman's constitution"
    • 81 Where synecdochal anthologies lift sublime fragments (usually in verse) out of their narrative context, synoptic abridgments translate dramatic dialogue into impersonal, retrospective narrative prose. In both cases, changes of scale occasion changes in genre.
      • Beauties of Shakespeare (1752), Tales from Shakespeare (1807?)
    • 82 these miniaturizing strategies fed the "anti-theatricality" of c18 Sh editions
    • 84-90 Bowdler and sexual tension in family reading
  • 92 verse epigraphs in prose narrative starts with Anne Radcliffe (?)
    • 96 used to regulate reading speed in gothic novels, "like subterranean passageways...the epigraph and inset poems cut readers off from the next chapter or the next event."
    • 98 using anthology structure to regulate impulsive reading in narrative space
  • 101 impt in case on Susan Ferrier "Ferrier's quotations need to be read not only as allusions to shakespeare (or Milton or Gray or Pope), but also as allusions to The Beauties of Shakespeare."
  • 102 Ferrier's quotations interesting because they're banal and commonplace -- our hermeneutics of difficulty isn't built for them
    • invokes (or presages) Surface Reading or Felski
  • 103-4 Quotation as communal exchange in Ferrier's model rather than isolated experience (Stendhal, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield)

Ch 3: Eliot

George Eliot and the Production of Consumers

  • 117 Eliot's practice of clothing her own words as quotations made her heir to Scott's triple role as poet-novelist, literary collector, and ennobler of a low genre. Although the order in which Eliot's novels and poems appeared reverses the chronology of Scott's career, within the novels themselves the relation between verse epigraphs and prose narrative looks strikingly similar. Like Scott's, Eliot's pseudonymous epigraphs change the motto from a place where authorship shifts to a place where genre switches. Surprisingly, although Eliot often depicts characters reading Scott's novels and poetry...she never quotes [him] in a chapter motto [in Middlemarch]. Scott's absence from the epigraphs paradoxically confirms Eliot's debt to him: it would be redundant to quote him in mottoes whose form already alludes to his work. While Eliot borrowed Shakespearean stature by quoting Sh directly, she became associated with Sc more obliquely, not by quoting him but by quoting like him - and by allowing Main [anthologizer] to repackage her work in several of the forms that the Waverley Novels had already spawned.
  • 118 The generic hierarchy implied by Sc's initial refusal to sign his novels legitimated Main's double ambition of redefining E from novelist to poet and stripping her novels of their narrative form. Yet as a novelist who granted new respectability to the genre, Sc also provided a model for the project of "sanctifying the novel" that Main undertook on E's behalf. More specifically, Sc's attempt to reclaim the genre from his feminine predecessors and contemporaries supplied a precedent at once for Eliot's masculine persona and for Main's eagerness to distance her fictions from what Marian Evans had called "silly novels by lady novelists."
  • 122 Mr Trumbull's [in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872) p. 569] description of the riddle collection as "an ornament for the table" and of his books as "calf" can serve as a reminder that Middlemarch itself is an object for sale. Yet his vulgarity immediately warns more tasteful readers to forget that fact. Eliot's distaste for the ostentatious binding of the Birthday Book needs to be set against her anxiety about her sensitivity to the physical materials of her own books. "I confess," she apologized to John Blackwood in a different context, "to the weakness of being affected by paper and type in something of the same subtle way as I am affected by the odour of a room." In a culture where book was to text as body was to mind, a novelist could download the materiality of her books only at the cost of lowering herself to notice such sensuous considerations as the obtrusiveness of the binding. The problem was not GE's alone: as early as 1847, GH Lewes's novel Ranthorpe introduced its protagonist reading the wares of a bookstall without buying any of them, insisting that "he cared not for rare editions, large paper copies, or sumptuous bindings. His hunger was for knowledge; he had a passion for books - no matter what edition, what bindings; he cared not even whether they had covers at all." Although the willful blindness to the cover which distinguishes Lewes's hero from Eliot's vulgar characters and "colonial" readers underscores the disjunction between reading and buying, the placement of this scene in the first chapter means that its readers may well have just purchased (or rented) Ranthorpe itself. In Middlemarch, too, the auctioneer's substitution of "volumes" for "books," like his specification of the binding and coloring, makes Eliot's worry about the crassly decorative uses to which books can be put -- including her own.
  • 124 Eliot's attempt to dissociate herself from the feminine forms of the annual, the album, and the gift book do not prevent Middlemarch itself from reappearing in those settings -- first in the Birthday Book and, ten years later, in A Souvenir of George eliot, a gift book whose size and binding borrows the model of the annual, as does its subordination of text to engravings. This is not to say that the annuals were no different from anthologies such as Main's: on the contrary, in their means of production, the two formed mirror-images of each other, since the anthologies collected material earlier published in single-author volumes, while the poems originally published in annual were often later collected in author-based editions. Yet both associate material ostentation and feminine readers with a loss of authorial integrity. Where the Bible, schoolbook, and sermon elevate the texts they frame, the Birthday book degrades them.
  • 128 David Carroll has argued persuasively that Eliot "wishes to define moral problems and assert certain values, but the forms of wisdom literature are no longer available." But the problem could just as well be phrased in the opposite terms. The riddle-book in Middlemarch, the Sayings, and the Birthday Book suggest that the forms of wisdom literature were all too easily available as commodities - in other words, that their accessibility to vulgar, young, and feminine readers discredited any "wisdom" that they contained.
    • one wonders about contemporary reactions to Henry Noel Humphreys' ostentatious lithographically illuminated psalters...
  • 139 ...Reviewers privileged the parts, which they were empowered to reproduce verbatim through sampling, over the whole, which they could represent only through their own inauthentic mediation.
    • positioning reviewing on a spectrum of mechanical reproduction along with industrial print - Benjamin
  • 143-44: My survey of the main periodicals suggested that the average length of excerpts decreased toward the end of the C19, but such trends are difficult to measure or to date.
    • someone should data mine this
  • 155 While the preference for beauties or for plot has continued to differentiate one class of novel-readers from another, the shift from a culture in which critics enjoy beauties while ladies devour stories to one where the vulgar appreciate stylistic ornament and the elite demands organic unity makes clear how arbitrary those markers of difference are. The common reflect to sift the whole from the detail unites the very audiences that it serves to distinguish. It also erases the difference between C19 reviewers offering bookbuyers representative samples and C20 critics reading against the grain.
  • 156 Far from reducing its readers to passive consumers, as opponents of fiction traditionally accused, the novel has relentlessly forced them to choose which audience to identify themselves with, and which rhythm of reading. In that context, its rise appears less a populist challenge to social and sexual hierarchies - as its defenders claimed, and its attackers accused, in the two centuries leading up to Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel - than, on the contrary, a means to stratify anew an expanding public.
Retrieved from "http://mattpoland.net/wiki/index.php?title=Price_2000&oldid=1819"