Anthologized Novel, The

Throughout her book, Price is concerned with the production of readers and she argues that the extended family of the anthology locates differences among readers rather than creates a unifying discourse. In this, her argument joins books such as Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction to suggest that the novel produces rather than reduces differences in culture. "The supply of abridgments created its own demand," Price explains, and she argues that Mrs. Humphrey Ward's nineteenth-century abridgment of Clarissa "claimed to respond to modern readers' need for an abridgment like hers." In so doing, however, "such an abridgment interpolated a new kind of impatient, plot-oriented reader" (59), very different from the kind of reader who would want to linger over the collections of "beauties" popular in the eighteenth century.

Price raises many questions about the way readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century read, asking us also to consider challenges to the way we read them. Her impressive research and the range of genres she includes in her argument opens up many areas for inquiry. I found myself thinking, as I read the book, that the challenge will be finding a way to draw the argument to a close. And Price does not: there is no conclusion to The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. But it is a mark of how convincing Price is about the centrality of the anthology to the way we read and to what we read, that so much more could be said; I'm sure, thanks to the kind of pioneering work done here by Price, it will be.

CAROLINE REITZ, St. Louis University

Copyright Novel, Inc. Fall 2003
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