Leah Price. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-05

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University

Leah Price. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 232. $70.00 cloth/$26.99 paper.

Hefty new anthologies of romantic literature, expanded to enlarge the canon, land on one's desk with a resounding thump, so it is easy to forget that the anthology is a miniaturizing strategy, one of several that Leah Price takes up in her elegantly written and persuasively argued brief for the anthology as a distinct and influential genre. In three central chapters which focus on the novelistic practices of Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, and George Eliot, Price aligns the anthology with its disreputable cousins--the abridgment, the expurgated edition, the bowdlerization--in order to show how these little-studied forms exerted an influence on reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anthologies and their ilk may not have altered how quickly the reader's eye scanned a page, but they fueled debates over the correct way to read, whether to linger over a salutary sentiment or to race along with the...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.