I have colleagues who believe with equal fervor that the self-designed coursepack is an invention of the devil and that it is God’s own handiwork. This most contemporary version of that much maligned artifact the Anthology is not, of course, that degraded kind of collection that out puritanical ancestor-teachers put together under rubrics like "maxims" or "virtuous meditation," or that belle-lettrist ancestor-teachers designed to promote "Elegant Extracts" or "Beauties." No. What we celebrate in the tailored coursepack, in this age of Cultural Studies, pluralism, and anti-hegemony, is context, voices, margins—especially the contextualizing voices from that supremely marginal space, the out-of-print.

The melancholy form of this gift, however, as Virginia Woolf's narrator in Between the Acts said of the communication between her artist's pageant and its audience, is inevitably one of "orts, scraps and fragments." What anthologies offer—and what all literary criticism quietly assumes about its own efforts—is an agreement to take the part for the whole, the passage for the package. This despite the fact that, as Leah Price notes in The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, "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" (p.6).

In this richly researched, wonderfully provocative book, Price puts the key on the table: "the needs to which the anthology responds are hermeneutic, not just logistical" (p.77). The "miniaturizing strategies" (p. 82) of anthologizers and abridgers, as with their more obvious agenda-driven colleagues the expurgators, respond not just to pressures requiring economy of scale but to the cultural politics of gender, genre, education, nationhood, and literacy itself, the arousal and control of reading-desire in a mass public recognized as both unified (for some purposes) and stratified (for others).

The period under study, roughly from the 1750s to the 1880s, saw the expansion and professionalization of writing and reading through a variety of intermediate identities, many of which writers and readers assimilated into their own identities. Writer, copier, editor, anthologizer, abridger, reviewer, critic, preacher, teacher, reader—all roles lie to hand for all, abetting and contending. Prestige genres, such as the culture-bearing epic, the heart-lifting lyric, and the wisdom texts of the sacred, all face an upstart form of the base genre, narrative. Samuel Richardson writes himself into all of these parts, and Anne Radcliffe packs raisins of lyric and scenic and nuts of epigram and headnote into the yeast of her narrative. Walter Scott doubles as himself and his characters and editors (and as Richardson and Radcliffe) "authorizing" what he will not "sign," collecting in order to invent, inventing where he cannot collect. The "Shakespeare industry" leads the way for all literary product to be collected and abridged to narrative, turned into "tales from," while it simultaneously elevates the Stratford entrepreneur of low degree and genre into poet-genius and national poet, making a groove for the elevation of the novel itself and for a new representative national poet-genius, "George Eliot."

Writers (their own first readers) recognize the hunger that makes a reader skip (anthologize) for interesting or beautiful things, and skim (abridge) for story. They strive to control for reading pace, harmonizing if they can the graces of perusalwith the pursuit of the story. Story and sentiment, motion and stasis, narrative and "beauties" or "truths" run unevenly, break into or out of one another in a text. Editors and collectors, abridgers and anthologizers make new texts that satisfy reader desire for the one or the other, each extracting one element as figure and leaving the other element behind as ground.

Reviewers and critics anxiously patrol the changing borders of genre, of aesthetic quality, and of the making and educating of a stable (and imperial) democracy, pointing out what is great in the texts and what is good for us, inevitably stratifying the raisins and nuts of beauties and truth in quotes, and the yeasty risings of story in paraphrase. And, half-consciously, all of these cultural mediators assist in the realignment of changing values associated with reading pace to their properly gendered division of reading labor: whether the "serious" reader was imagined as the one willing to stop and peruse timeless truths or fine style or the one critically in search of the structure of the story, the serious reader was male; whether the "frivolous" reader was imagined as the one blindly pursuing the end of the story or the one easily distracted by details of pretty scenes and sidetracked by the underlining of approved morals and maxims, the frivolous reader was female.

Leah Price tells this tale with exemplary pace, perusing widely the literary landscape and pursuing the story of cultural exchange. Never has the multiplicity of Richardson's abridger-narrators and anthologizer-characters and manly executors of literary and other Real property seemed more culturally urgent; never has the reader-terror/reader-hunger of Mary Ann Evans, her text hoarding and quote-anxiety, been more deftly placed in context.

Price also tackles the mystery of the disappearance of the epistolary novel in the nineteenth century: much has been and remains to be debated about this. But it is extremely illuminating for Price to position at the center of this storyline J.G. Lockhart's widely read and reviewed 1838 Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., and his even more influential abridgement of the many-volumed, multi-voiced Memoirs to the 1848 The Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., which was dominated by the editor's narrative summaries. This positioning beautifully sets up her analysis of Scott's 1824 letter-to-journal-to-narrative novel Redgauntlet as a replaying not just of the battle between Jacobites and Whigs but also of the competition of Richardson and Fielding for narration-king—winner in both cases already in place.

Illuminating too is the book's middle section, on the cultural politics of the stratified submarkets—new kinds of schools, audiences, and social and financial classes for new kinds of anthologies. We can see the success of the new genre through the nervousness of Jane Austen or Hannah More about their ubiquity and appeal; we can see the fractures of the "family circle" in the nervous instructions for use of the very Family Shakespeare abridged by Thomas Bowdler to unite it. We can see in the interpolated lyrics of Anne Radcliffe’s novels the same kind of "textual speed-bumps" (p. 96) to the pure energies of narrative that are provided by those garrulous servants within her novels who never come to the point of a story—each kind of "interpolation" pointing to non-narrative readerly pleasures, and readerly identities, of a different social class than the conscripted middle-class reader of fiction.

Most of all, in the experience of reading this learned and surprisingly enjoyable book, we find our own selves very much in the picture. Price never lets her reader forget that the enterprise of reading to teach, and especially reading to write (as now), is hip-deep in the ambiguities and exigencies of anthologizing and abridging, deploying a hermeneutic against skipping and skimming that relies, naturally, on those very same (why should we not call them?) skills. That said, I end with Price's own ending, an elegant extract, both elegy and enigma: "what language, if any, [can] professional readers…invent to talk about the experience of those who consume texts without producing others?" (p. 156).