- Judith Hawley, Sharp News 11.4 (Autumn 2002): 10-11
Leah Price's insightful and wide-ranging study of the close and
complex relationships between the anthology and the rise of the novel
is essentially a study of quotation in and quotation of the novel. In
a series of interconnected studies of Samuel Richardson, Walter
Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Susan Ferrier, and George Eliot (with
subsections on Shakespeare, Rousseau, and others), Price demonstrates
that, even in its early years, the novel - seemingly unified by its
creation of a fictional world - was pulled in the direction of
fragmentation by its inclusion of detachable sayings and by its
excerption in anthologies. Anthologies, according to Price, responded
to two related literary and moral panics: the fear among some people
of being so overwhelmed by new publications that one could not stay
abreast of them, and the more widespread fear that readers -
especially young, female readers - were not even prepared to try to
keep up. Selective reading thus was both a necessity and a moral
failing. Price identifies two chief ways of reading selectively, and
two corresponding formal expedients: skimming (which was pandered to
by abridgements), and skipping (a taste fed by selections of
"beauties").
One of the many strengths of this ambitious book is that Price
demonstrates how the practice of anthologising depends on several
paradoxes of exclusion and inclusion, both social and literary.
Appealing to the "common" rather than the rarified reader, the
anthology is nonetheless predicated on the assumption that most texts
are not fully suitable for all readers. Consequently, both the novel
and drama were subjected to processes of excerption and expurgation
to disinfect them for a middle-class family audience. The result was
not just moral refurbishment, but "generic cleansing." Thus the
industrious editor and sycophantic admirer of Eliot, Alexander Main,
could propose to John Blackwood an anthology entitled, A
Selection of British Lyrics from Shakespeare to George Eliot.
Price charts a significant shift in attitudes regarding the ways of
reading and writing embodied in anthologies. Whereas in the
eighteenth century anthologies selected moral sentiments, in the
nineteenth they picked out aesthetic plums. Both were designed to
counterbalance supposedly bad habits attributed to women readers and
writers. While eighteenth-century commentators criticised women
readers for skipping over moral lessons, nineteenth-century ones
treated reading for the sentiment as dawdling over didacticism, and,
in the age of the Railway novel, considered brisk reading a thrifty
virtue, or, alternatively, did not want to disrupt the organic unity
of the work of art. Such insights are made possible by Price's
combination of reception theory, narrative theory, and book history.
However, her argument is, I think, too dependent on the establishment
of ingenious parallels. Numerous links in her chain of reasoning
depend on constructions such as "just as" and "at once." This
technique gives rise to several problems. First, these parallels are
just that: parallels, coincidences, and similarities, not causal
relationships or cases of common identity. Second, her interest in
metaphor and wordplay exposes a potential methodological conflict:
her more ingenious literary interpretations operate on a different
level of evidentiary status from her archival work. Furthermore,
because of her interest in parallels, she never fully attends to the
differences between the types of quote-containing texts she analyses.
It would be helpful to have a clearer description, even a taxonomy of
types of quotation, from the inclusion of fragments with novels to
the fragmentation of novels in single or multiple-author anthologies.
Nevertheless, both the sweep of her argument and the quality of her
particular readings make this a very important book about books and
their readers.