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 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 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)] 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.
  • anticipating Price 2012
• 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.