Anthologized Novel, The

The Anthologized Novel LEAH PRICE, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 224, cloth, $55.00, paper, $23.99.

Trying to save money on books during graduate school, I bought a used edition of Clarissa instead of the one ordered for class. I did not find out it was an abridged version until I began to read through the apologetically defensive preliminary pages. While I knew reading an abridged version would not cut it in a graduate seminar, I was unaware of how many vital theoretical issues my frugality had involved me in; after reading Leah Price's justly celebrated work on the anthology, I now realize. Price makes a convincing argument that the anthology and its extended family (abridgments, extracts, popular editions, reviews-even birthday books) dramatically influenced not only the rise of the novel, but the way we read them and who we become through that reading process. As the book's introductory blurb suggests, Price's book brings together two traditionally "antagonistic fields, book history and narrative theory," but the questions raised about the novel stretch beyond even these fields to gender studies and the work of literary criticism itself.

One of the many impressive things about Price's book is that it manages to do this with shocking economy. The book itself consists of a relatively brief Introduction and three chapters: one on Samuel Richardson, one covering miscellaneous adventures in eighteenth-century anthologizing, such as Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts, and one on George Eliot. Covering so much textual and theoretical ground in such little space makes for some dense argumentation. Following Price where almost no previous scholars have gone before-from multiple repackagings of Shakespeare to multiple editions of Clarissa-requires serious concentration and not a little faith. But part of the book's persuasive charm is Price's attention to the contemporary relevance of these issues: noting such problems as those faced today by the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (Price notes that the editors of the Norton are "experimenting with a salon des refuses on the Web" 77); the reality that most of our students, for whom eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature is too long to fit into crowded college schedules, are in actuality studying the excerpt; and the way our own profession works. As Price admits, "extracts underwrite the discipline of literary criticism as we know it" (2).

The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel speaks to the larger question of why the novel rose, Jane Eyre-like, from humble and objectionable beginnings to a kind of cultural hegemony. Price gives us insight into the secret life of aesthetic form and how it evolves, a word deliberately chosen, as Price draws a part of her ideas from Gillian Beer's famous reading in Darwin's Plots of the relationship between narrative and evolutionary theory. The novel's narrative strategies compete with, adapt and render extinct other forms in the literary marketplace. Price asks us to consider why certain forms, such as the epistolary novel, die out and in what forms they are resurrected, such as in Sir Walter Scott's "historicizing the epistolary novel" in his Redgauntlet (59). In her reading of Richardson's struggle with the piracy of, sequels to, and multiple editions of Clarissa, for example, Price illustrates the survival of the fittest in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace.

As Price uses Darwin effectively, she also brings to life Bakhtin's suggestion about the novel and its unique capacity for the "novelization" of other genres. In her second chapter, she usefully shows how the novel acquires centrality through these other forms: "Abridgment contributed to define prose narrative as the transparent medium into which all other genres could eventually be translated" (83). An example of this is the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, a novelization of Shakespeare meant to appeal to particular types of readers, such as families or women, with the aim of providing a version cleansed of its immoral theatricality, or as Price writes of "displac[ing] the stage by the family" (84). While Price's analysis of this reworking of past texts for new kinds of readers is fascinating, one of the main arguments of the first two chapters is to show us how this shapes the future rather than the past: "by proving the power of low genres to establish a hierarchy of forms and audiences, the anthology shaped the production of new novels even more than the reproduction of the literary past" (99).

Price is right to give Eliot a whole chapter. She is an important figure at the crossroads of not only publishing, editing, popular fiction and serious moralizing, but she is quoted to an almost bizarre degree: I have encountered quotations from Eliot's work on construction billboards in the mall, on the subway and even on a needlepoint sofa pillow. The argument of this final chapter is that through frequent and various collections of excerpts from the work of Eliot, such as those produced by Alexander Main, not only does the novel consolidate its cultural identity, but the figure of the "self-important female sage" is created (106), as well. Paradoxically, Eliot both benefited from and was threatened by these collections. On the one hand, the appearance of her words in so many formats enabled her to rise, Shakespeare-like, above genre: "In her case as in Shakespeare's, individual genius overruled the generic categories that normally govern admittance to anthologies-and to the canon. Name trumps genre. Main's Sayings and the anthologies that followed made Eliot's relation to other novelists as tenuous as her relation to other women. Like another admirer's description of Eliot as 'the female Shakespeare, so to speak,' their invocation of Shakespeare defined her as an anomaly" (111). On the other hand, Eliot was helpless to determine entirely the uses made in these multiple formats of "Eliot." She tried to "dissociate herself from the feminine forms of the annual, the album, and the gift book" but that did "not prevent Middlemarch itself from reappearing in those settings" (124). As readers of Eliot's "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" know, Eliot tries to encourage a more serious mission for the novel and the novel reader; but this was also at odds, Price argues, with what was shaping up to be, according to Victorian reviewers of Eliot, "the business-and the responsibility-of fiction" (151).