Price 2000

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 abridgement 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 marget 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, annecdotally, as corruptions that reflect a "horizon of expectations" against which to measure authorial originality. Yet competing editorial alternatives (anthology, abridgement, 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 abridgements 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.