Leah Price Research Articles

Where to Do Things with Words

Inspired by Leah Price's recent plea on behalf of the study of ‘nonreading’ and literary logistics, this essay reconstructs a slice of the history of reading locations by analysing the decoration advice, the changing symbolic associations and the modes of print circulation connected with private libraries and toilets in the writings of two modern authors: Edith Wharton and Henry Miller.

Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

Book Review| June 01 2013 Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 350. $29.95. Richard Menke Richard Menke University of Georgia Richard Menke, Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is the author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (2008). He is currently at work on a book about the late-Victorian invention of media. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2013) 68 (1): 113–116. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2013.68.1.113 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Richard Menke; Review: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 June 2013; 68 (1): 113–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2013.68.1.113 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

LEAH PRICE. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.

LEAH PRICE. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Medieval English Manuscripts:

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price (review)

Reviewed by: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price Solveig C. Robinson (bio) How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price; pp. 360. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. $33.46 cloth. In this fascinating text, Leah Price ranges widely over territory that is usually carved up into separate fiefdoms by scholars of the history of the book, the history of reading, or some form of literary criticism. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain suggests that when we do this carving up, making distinctions between “texts” and material books, readers and “book handlers,” we inevitably miss something about what the books and their circulation can and do mean. Price argues compellingly that the Victorians pre-empted modern-day book historians in probing the meaning and use of books and other printed matter. By sorting the relations in the nineteenth century between “reading (doing something with words), handling (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book)” (6), Price suggests that we might come to better “understand the printed ‘before’ against which so many twenty- first-century commentators measure their digital ‘after’” (7) and thereby avoid unhelpfully idealizing printed texts, especially in relation to digital ones. Although Price’s study runs the gamut of nineteenth-century genres (and paper-based productions generally), her focus is the tension between the middle-class Bildungsroman and the tract. These two extremely popular forms allow her to reflect on the meanings and functioning of different genres, classes of audience, and models of literacy in the Victorian era. She observes that while the novels “frame reading in terms of individual agency, self-fashioning, even transgression,” the tracts instead embed reading within [End Page 228] an “interpersonal transaction” (17), one that is mediated by the giver and receiver of the tract and the circumstances under which it is exchanged. As her text makes clear, heedlessly mapping one notion of reading onto another kind of reading material can lead both Victorian and modern critics to misunderstand what a particular reading situation might signify. Price’s book is arranged into seven chapters that she acknowledges may be of unequal interest or utility to those who come to the book with particular questions. Chapter 1, “Reader’s Block,” is largely theoretical, concerned with teasing out the possibilities and pitfalls of multiple approaches to literature and literary history. (As the title suggests, this chapter may prove daunting to readers who are not steeped in the various critical approaches Price engages, and readers who prefer a more genre-based approach to the material will be relieved to know that the author herself grants permission to skip it.) Price traces the competitiveness among contemporary strands of scholarship, noting that a “familiar intellectual-historical narrative” tells us that “since the New Criticism, literary critics have spearheaded an assault on the book’s materiality, elevating the study of literature by demoting bibliographers to a service profession” (32). But, she explains, If the book has been invisible and intangible even to those literary-critical schools that succeeded them, it isn’t only for the negative reason that material culture remains absent from our training; it’s also because a commonsense Cartesianism or Platonism more actively numbs us to the look and feel of the printed page. Hence critics’ discomfort with purely bibliographic units—the page-break as opposed to the line-break, the volume as opposed to the chapter. (31–32) Furthermore, Price notes the importance of distinguishing between the “history of the book” and the “history of reading,” as “reading is not the only thing that can be done to books” (34). However, she also emphasizes that although books, like other objects, can be subjected to many uses beyond the one for which they are originally designed, they remain a distinctive category: “Even the most unreadable book still differs from nontextual objects in the way it’s priced, cataloged, and handled,” she explains, and so “the exceptionalism of the book should be no less visible to economists than to literary critics” (35). Price points out that not only did the Victorians recognize the distinction between...

The Fate of an “Ambitious School-Marm”: Amy Cruse and the History of Reading

The Fate of an “Ambitious School-Marm”Amy Cruse and the History of Reading Patrick Buckridge (bio) As the author of a series of four large “reader-centered” volumes of English literary history, published 1928–1938, and extending from the Anglo-Saxons to the Edwardians, Amy Cruse (1870–1952) was undoubtedly a pioneer historian of reading. Yet she is seldom mentioned by later reading historians, and when she is it is often with a certain ambivalence. Richard Altick, while never giving her entrée to his main text, credited her in a footnote with “a good description of the place of religious literature in Victorian middle-class life” and adopted her figures for Mudie’s book purchases in the 1850s.1 By 1980, however, his caution had grown to the point of footnoting an uncorroborated statement about the magazine publication of Nicholas Nickleby with the comment, “So, at least, says Amy Cruse in The Victorians and their Books (London, 1935)”—declining even to provide a page reference.2 Kate Flint, in The Woman Reader 1837–1914, makes explicit the basis for Altick’s caution—and probably for the wide berth other scholars seem to have given Cruse’s work—when she calls The Victorians and their Books “one of the earliest examples of research into nineteenth-century women readers, … wide-ranging but infuriatingly unreferenced.”3 And there, probably, we have it. Her books are not entirely without scholarly apparatus: they all have indexes. But of the hundreds of interesting, useful, sometimes quite recherché examples of individual and collective reading-responses and observations about books that are reported or quoted throughout the four volumes, none is conventionally referenced, and only a very few are casually and incompletely identified in the main text. It is indeed an infuriating state of affairs, even though, as I shall try to show, the books are interesting and satisfying in their own right, and deserve to be better known. But the question of why Cruse made the seemingly perverse decision not to reference her work properly in the first place is itself of some interest. [End Page 272] What could she have been thinking? An answer to that question may help us to understand and appreciate her achievement better, and at the same time open a window on a somewhat neglected aspect of the institutional provenance of modern reading historiography. If, as Leah Price has suggested, “no academic discipline can really be said to have arrived until it receives the final mark of legitimacy: a Routledge Reader,”4 then the history of reading, like book history, has indeed arrived—if not as a discipline, then certainly as a “defined field of study.” For the editors of the recent Routledge Reader, the new field has emerged “from the context of the history of the book, economic and social history, and literary criticism and theory”5—an impeccably scholarly genealogy. But Cruse’s adoption of what the Routledge editors would call a “micro-analytical approach” to the history of reading, namely the study of individual readers’ recorded interactions with specific books,6 predates the work of scholars such as Jauss, Tompkins, and Ginzburg by several decades,7 and later, more wide-ranging microanalytical studies and projects by three-quarters of a century.8 What is different about Cruse’s work is that it emerges out of a context not of academic scholarship, where full and accurate referencing has been de rigueur for 150 years or more, but mainly of applied curriculum development and practical pedagogics in teacher education, where referencing has been much less consistently practiced.9 The different institutional contexts and discursive conventions are a necessary but not, I think, sufficient determinant of Cruse’s decision. Another possible factor would of course be pressure from her publisher, whom one might suspect of trying to economize by refusing to pay for more “extras” than a general index; but this is made less likely by the fact that the four books were published by two different publishers. George G. Harrap published The Shaping of English Literature (1927) and The Englishman and his Books in the Early Nineteenth Century (1930), and George Allen & Unwin The Victorians and their Books (1935...

Leah Price. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.

Leah Price. <i>How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain</i>.

LEAH PRICE. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.

LEAH PRICE. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.

How To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Leah Price.

Leah Price, How To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press, 2012) 350 + $29.95 In Leah Price's absorbing inquiry, Hoxo To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, books out serve a whole range of uses--and not of have much do with reading. Indeed analysis as a whole is prompted by question meanings do books make even, or especially, when they go unread? (2). Exploring this question through a fusion of literary, cultural, and historical methods and book studies, Price opens up fresh avenues of thought about both history of book and history of novel in 19th century. How To Do Things with Books greatly broadens forms and spaces of interaction with printed matter, directing attention a range of different uses and posing new questions. At same time it also repositions 19th century novel, particularly canonical bildungsroman, by recasting both its relationship books and its self-presentation. One or other of these projects would have sufficed make this an important work; both make it a major achievement. Motivating study as a whole is an overriding critique of the primacy of reading itself' in literary and intellectual history: dissolution of book into text that has long flattened out other modalities of interaction with printed books (21). Nor is book history itself, despite its current resurgence as history, immune from pressure of text/book binary; indeed argument outlined in Chapter 1 (nicely titled Reader's Block) takes as a specific target lumping together of history of book and history of reading. Now that 'the history of books and reading' has become a catchphrase, Price observes, two terms have become interchangeable (34). But these two strands of inquiry do not necessarily go hand-in-hand; nor does reading exhaust uses or purposes of books. A primary goal of /low To Do Things with Books is thus recover what has been overwritten by heroic myth--whether Protestant, liberal, New Critical, or New Historicist--that makes textuality source of interiority, authenticity, and selfhood (16). Equally, however, it seeks avoid a lumping that threatens from opposite direction. The cultural turn in intellectual and literary studies, it argues, has produced a poetics of deflation keen relocate ideas and mind in marketplace or body, while trends in book history have tended to reduce book one object among many (22, 34). The strength of How To Do Things with Books lies in agility with which it avoids both idealist and materialist reduction (even as its own adherence is a more culturalist model). Throughout it keeps in view doubleness that distinguishes book both as an object of use and a subject of analysis. In a characteristically witty turn, first chapter un derscores this doubleness by invoking bookish make at once a historical and theoretical point. An old joke, pun literalizing dead book metaphors was recharged in 19th century, as printed proliferated and literacy expanded. Price's entertaining survey (e.g. I lost my Bacont' other day--could anything be harder?/My cook had taken it by stealth--I found it in Larder 27) renders concrete historical import of pun in century as an instrument of social sorting. Formally, however, pun works more abstractly mark the gulf separating bibliographic codes from linguistic codes; in this sense it operates as a corrective the recent strand of book-historical scholarship that set out dovetail them (35). For Price those moments when two strands pull apart but remain in view (35)--the moment of pun--are most productive for analysis, and her own study deftly keeps in simultaneous play operations of reading, handling, and circulating. Marshalling an impressive array of documentation, primarily literary and journalistic (including some visual caricatures), Hoxo To Do Things with Books aims reconstruct nineteenth-century understandings of, and feelings toward, uses of printed matter (5). …

Leah Price (ed): Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books

Think of this as Playboy for bibliophiles. Dozens of full-page, high resolution photographs will have you tilting Unpacking My Library on its side to better admire the stacks and shelves of thirteen authors from a variety of genres. Supporting interviews tell you when the authors bought their first books, how they arrange their books, and what books they keep on their bedside tables. Leah Price, professor of English at Harvard, has put together a captivating little collection that will leave you wanting more. Six of the thirteen authors included in Unpacking My Library—Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, Lev Grossman and Sophie Gee, and Claire Messud and James Wood—are couples and were chaptered together but interviewed separately. Each couple interviewed maintains shared libraries, so for each, there is a single photo set. The remaining seven authors included are Alison Bechdel, Stephen Carter, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Lethem, Philip Pullman, Gary Shteyngart, and Edmund White. Most exciting to me was the chapter with Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, one of my favorite series growing up. Pullman is the only author featured in Unpacking My Library who wrote an essay response instead of answering each of Price’s questions in turn and it’s nice to read his words uninterrupted. That said, Price asks great questions. Have you ever in your life given up reading? Uniformly not. How do you dispose of unwanted books? Bechdel keeps them, Diaz gives his away, Grossman and Gee put theirs out on the curb, Shteyngart uses the trash. How do you arrange your books? Jonathan Lethem ‘‘oscillate[s] between alphabetical absolutism and imperatives of genre, size, color, [and] publisher’’ (114). Authors were also asked about their shelving arrangements. Pinker stores his books in stackable cubes in order to avoid ‘‘those awful things called bookends’’

Figures of Reading

Figures of Reading Nathan K. Hensley (bio) Garrett Stewart , Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 268. $45.00 cloth. If you've browsed the Internet or visited a blog at any point in the past decade, then you probably already know that reading is dead. Doomsday reports in the popular and academic presses conspire with our own daily experience, as we tweet and text (or don't), to suggest that the data-processing function called reading has morphed forever into browsing, skimming, multitasking. These shifts in everyday life have found institutional corollaries in literary studies, as older methods now feel called upon to justify their relevance in the face of new processes like data mining, information aggregating, n-gramming. "Today," says Franco Moretti with ambiguous tone, "we can replicate in a few minutes investigations that took a giant like Leo Spitzer months and years of work."1 Moretti is citing a study in Science heralding a new species of technological reading, "Culturomics"—a rival, it would appear, to his own. Such advances in literary numerology transform quality to quantity on a massive scale, reconceiving reading as data analysis, hermeneutics as information science. With just a keystroke on Google's Ngram website, anyone can graph a word's frequency in printed books since 1500—or at least those scanned by Google—test driving what even the New York Times now calls "Humanities 2.0."2 Depending on how you view it, this transformation has either [End Page 329] chipped away at what makes the humanities human or helped outfit English for a renovated world. Within the discipline, the digital turn has generated dynamic new subfields, but has also enabled critics in historical areas to rethink reading from the ground up. Led by Nicholas Dames, Caroline Levine, Alan Liu, Deidre Lynch, Mary Poovey, and Leah Price, these critics have reached beyond new historicism and cultural studies to examine our place in the history of reading and to question the metaphors that define—or should define—our engagement with text-based information. Should the reading we do be close or distant? Deep or superficial? Fast or slow? And is literature information or something, well, better? In a much-discussed 2009 special issue of Representations called "The Way We Read Now," Sharon Marcus and Steven Best catalog alternatives to the interpretive reading-for-depth they claim has become orthodox in literary studies.3 Their proposal, surface reading, combines methods that linger instead on the manifest, the tactile: from book history and autotelic formalism to Marcus's just reading,4 a theoretically elaborated version of what students sometimes call not reading too much into it. Leah Price, for her part, suggests "we do not, and need not, read books at all."5 Against such invocations of surface and speed are arrayed defenses of the deep and slow. Thus, for example, Jane Gallop has indexed the losses already suffered by fine-grained reading and called for a reinvigorated curriculum of closeness. For Gallop, intimate reading at small scales defeats preconceived notions of what a text "will probably say," short-circuiting prewired expectations. This ability to register particularity is the very justification for teaching literature in the first place—and not, as the New Critics had it, the other way around.6 In ways Best and Marcus do not, Gallop therefore makes explicit that by redrawing the boundaries of what reading is and should be, critics also (whether they like it or not) take positions on larger questions about the nature of the humanities in the contemporary marketplace of ideas. If the new austerity has made humanities an endangered species, does a shift to what has been called distant reading hasten or slow their extinction? In a universe organized according to principles of numbers-based rationality, should literary analysis become more efficient, more transparent, more informational—or less so?7 Without citing any of this, Garrett Stewart's new book intervenes into recent debates about reading by showing how the slow and deep can share space with the quick and new. Despite its own claims, Novel Violence is less an investigation into violence or an announcement of a new...

This Is Enlightenment ed. by Clifford Siskin, William Warner

Clifford Siskin and William Warner, eds. This Is Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. xii+505. $75.00. Jon Klancher (JK): The collection This Is can be hard to review as a stand-alone book because it also belongs to a series of actions or gatherings, a larger and controversial taking place over the past several years (including at the conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism last year in Vancouver). At one level, this event has been radiating panels, lectures, forums and other academic spinoffs, starting with the conference Mediating held at NYU in April 2007. It's no small undertaking, and the Chicago volume (hereafter TIE) is only the most crystallized print form of that wider project. Whatever criticisms I myself have, I want to put them in this light--something is happening around here, and we have a pretty good idea by now what it is. But what to call it? This broader seems to be crystallizing around 2010, but for several years scholars have been trying to give it a name: a bibliographical (Leah Price in PMLA), a digital-humanities (Matthew Kirschenbaum in the ADE Journal), a quantitative (Jeffrey Williams in The Chronicle of Higher Education). (1) Any of these calls could be justified, but my own choice would be to call it a wider turn--on a scale that rivals the scope of earlier linguistic and cultural turns--and this book speaks to such a by gathering scholars notable in literary history, studies, and archaeology and asking them how to put those fields together, accentuating and even redefining media as the historical operator. As I read it, the volume is asking: To what extent was the an event in the history of media? But also: what has kept us from grasping literary and art history before the late 19th century as we grasp mechanized and mass after the advent of telegraphy, photography, movies, or tv: namely, as media. I think the more amorphous term the editors invoke--mediations--is an effort to generalize the question, so the editors, William Warner and Clifford Siskin, claim in the Introduction that Enlightenment is an event in the history of (1). They may get into difficulties, though, by trying to give mediations a definite shape and weight, reducing them to tools, for example. Alan Bewell (AB): This broader intellectual interest in understanding historically how cultural, literary, and political modes of representation are shaped by the material through which they were originally communicated or subsequently received is certainly the governing context for this publication, and it is in this area where the book will have its primary impact. In moving towards a discussion of what TIE says about the history of and in assessing to what degree it makes an important contribution to our understanding of how a turn might lead to a transformation in literary and cultural studies, it is perhaps worth stating at the beginning what this book is not: that is, a book about the Enlightenment, or even more broadly, about the mediated reception of the over the past 250 years. The editors promise a book that will use mediation to answer the question What is Enlightenment? and their answer, that we should read in terms of the forms of that made it possible, is an exciting one. Unfortunately, despite the degree to which this book focuses on communication (here I am thinking particularly of William Warner's superb essay Transmitting Liberty, which discusses the role of newspapers and correspondence committees in the formation of an American revolutionary political identity), the editors' idea of what the book is supposed to be about seems not to have been adequately communicated to the contributors. Most, though well known for work in other areas and periods, are not particularly well known as specialists on the Enlightenment. …

&lt;em&gt;Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700––1900&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen

Reviewed by: Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 Solveig C. Robinson (bio) Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900, edited by Ina Ferris and Paul Keen; pp. x + 283. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £55.00, $80.00. Although the subtitle of this volume suggests that it encompasses two full centuries of book history, a cursory review of its table of contents quickly reveals its origins in an American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conference session. The book's twelve chapters are written primarily by eighteenth-century and Romantic scholars, and the content similarly is concentrated in the first half of the covered era. While only three [End Page 365] articles are expressly concerned with the Victorian period, several others, however, offer valuable contextual and critical analyses that point forward in potentially productive ways. Linked—however tenuously—by a debt to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the literary field and its imperative to examine literary history as a complex of book history, cultural history, and literary studies, the essays in this volume invite us, in the editors' words, to think about literary production "as at once a materially embedded activity, caught up in a thick network of concrete material relations, and an intensely symbolic activity, engaged in the less easily defined pursuit of authority and legitimacy in a competitive artistic and professional (as well as commercial) arena" (8). Of most immediate interest to Victorianists will be the contributions by William R. McKelvy, Deidre Lynch, and Leah Price. McKelvy's "'This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print': Making Literary History in the Age of Steam" concentrates on publisher Robert Chambers and his contributions to the definition of English literary studies. Based on a close examination of the contents and publishing history of Chambers's History of the English Language and Literature (1835) and his subsequent Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1842–44), McKelvy claims that Chambers "was the first single author to compose a narrative literary history that covered both verse and prose fiction during a long period that extended into the nineteenth century" (63). McKelvy notes the importance of Chambers's recognition that the novel was in fact the rising literary genre of the early nineteenth century, a recognition born of his close association with the works of Walter Scott. McKelvy also calls attention, however, to Chambers's innovations in publishing, particularly his embrace of steam-powered printing. Having established "the world's first industrialized information factory, one that produced a weekly periodical [Chambers's Edinburgh Journal] as part of an on-going process of production and reproduction" (71), Chambers was an essential player in the process of generating more—and less expensive—publications for Britain's burgeoning literary appetites. Lynch's "Canons' Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use" is an illuminating examination of the evolution of the reading habit in the nineteenth century. Combining Samuel Johnson's and Leigh Hunt's notions of literature as "that which we are always re-reading and never reading for the first time" with Harold Bloom's "no-nonsense definition of the canonical text as simply the durable, complex text that demands re-reading" (89, 90), Lynch suggests we need to rethink our assumptions that the novel's growing popularity derived from its novelty. In an era in which the medical profession prescribed regularity of habit as crucial to health, reliability was an important value—even in literature. Lynch looks at the many accounts of (sometimes compulsive) re-reading of beloved texts, along with the prevalence of periodic and serial forms during the period, to argue that the novel's actual appeal may have been its predictability. "Might we connect the form's ascendancy to the public's willingness to ratify," she asks provocatively, "the proposition that, under ideal conditions, every reading might represent a resumption of an earlier, interrupted reading?" (101). Price's "Getting the Reading Out of It: Paper Recycling in Mayhew's London" is one of the most enjoyable chapters in the volume. Starting with the question of why Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62) "so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned" (149), Price systematically...

Horizons of the Publishable: Publishing in/ as Literary Studies

It is conventionally assumed that book publishing is a process through which writing is relayed to readers: publishing conceived as publication. At most, publishing is acknowledged as a process which writing passes through, with effects that are partially acknowledged for mass-market genre fiction, and almost universally denied for literary fiction. Here I argue that publishing—as a set of processes and practices—is constitutive of all formations of writing and reading. Publishing precedes writing and governs the possibilities of reading. This article is an explicit challenge to both contemporary book studies and literary studies. The argument elaborated here takes publishing—as a set of processes, practices and relations—to the centre of literary studies. It should be immediately clear that the definitions of “publishing” and the publishable formulated here, owe little to common sense. These common senses, implicit and explicit, are elaborated in the first section of this article. Section two presents a critical alternative. A sketch of this critical alternative—horizons of the publishable—follows. I finish by outlining some of the transformations effected by publishing and the publishable on concepts such as style, genre, intertextuality, adaptation, and the literary, in its strong evaluative sense. The materiality of the book is now both topos and mantra. Varying modes of publication, the diverse physical forms of texts, and historically variegated reading practices are routinely invoked as contexts in ever more nuanced accounts of textuality and reading. In part, this represents the selective movement of book studies into the literary studies mainstream. Leah Price’s introduction to the 2006 PMLA special issue—“Book History and the Idea of Literature

PMLA 121.1 (January 2006): Special Issue on the History of the Book and the Idea of Literature

Book Review| April 01 2008 PMLA 121.1 (January 2006): Special Issue on the History of the Book and the Idea of Literature PMLA 121.1 (January 2006): Special Issue on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature, ed. Seth Lerer and Leah Price. G. Thomas Tanselle G. Thomas Tanselle Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2008) 14 (2): 321–323. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2007-085 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation G. Thomas Tanselle; PMLA 121.1 (January 2006): Special Issue on the History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. Common Knowledge 1 April 2008; 14 (2): 321–323. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2007-085 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Duke University Press2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

BOOK REVIEW:Literary Secretaries / Secretarial Culture, edited by Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell

BOOK REVIEW:<i>Literary Secretaries / Secretarial Culture</i>, edited by Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell

The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer

The Location of Literature:The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer Rebecca L. Walkowitz (bio) Precisely where is English literature produced?" This is Gauri Viswanathan's question, from an essay about the transformation of English studies in the wake of postcolonial theory (22). Her answer—not only "in England, of course"—focuses on the genealogy of the discipline, its development within the British Empire and other dominions outside England through the education of colonial subjects and the efforts of strangers such as "Jews, Dissenters, and Catholics" (23). But her answer also focuses on the dynamic relationship between "sites of cultural production and institutionalization," the way that "English literature" names a mode of analysis and a collection of works as well as the way that modes of analysis establish collections. In fact, she suggests, there is no "English literature" before institutionalization: only with disciplinary protocols do cultural products become a field (20). "Where is English literature produced?" thus asks us to consider that the location of literature depends not only on the places where books are written but also on the places where they are classified and given social purpose. In its emphasis on critical geographies, Viswanathan's question remains important to continuing debates about the "national attributes" of literature (21). Yet today we would be likely to ask several other questions as well: In what language does English literature circulate? Where is English literature read? Who counts as a producer (writers, but also editors, printers, designers, publishers, translators, reviewers)? And how has the global circulation of English literature shaped its strategies and forms of appearance? These questions turn from production to circulation, and back again, reflecting a new [End Page 527] emphasis on the history of the book and what Leah Price calls "the geography of the book" within postcolonial studies and world literature ("Tangible Page" 38). This work reinvigorates and reframes Homi K. Bhabha's claim that disciplinary models of comparison and distinction will have to be tested by new ways of understanding community. In The Location of Culture, published in 1994, Bhabha argued, "The very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or 'organic' ethnic communities—as the grounds of cultural comparativism—are in a profound process of redefinition" (5). A decade and more later, essays and reports about the future of literary studies assume the heterogeneity and discontinuity of national cultures, and many scholars now emphasize "networks" of tradition and the social processes through which those networks are established (Damrosch, "What Is World Literature" 3; Greene 216–21). Haun Saussy's essay on the state of comparative literature, published with replies as Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, marks and elaborates this turn. Like Saussy's volume, Immigrant Fictions suggests that literary studies will have to examine the global writing of books, in addition to their classification, design, publication, translation, anthologizing, and reception across multiple geographies. Books are no longer imagined to exist in a single literary system but may exist, now and in the future, in several literary systems, through various and uneven practices of world circulation. Consider, for example, the literary systems represented on the cover of this volume, which displays in miniature the covers of five contemporary works of fiction in English—or, really, the covers of five editions of those works: they are, from left to right, the U.S. paperback reprint of George Lamming's Season of Adventure (1999; first edition, 1960), the U.S. paperback reprint of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée (2001; first edition, 1982), the British paperback translation of Iva Pekárková's Gimme the Money (2000; first edition, 1995), the Japanese paperback translation of David Peace's Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2001; first edition, 2000), and the U.S. paperback reprint of Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2004; first edition, 2003). These editions (as well as several others) are discussed in the volume's essays, which follow Contemporary Literature's stated mission by focusing only on literature in English. But as I have been suggesting, [End Page 528] it has become more difficult to assert with confidence that we know what literature in English is. Some of the books depicted...

Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (review)

Reviewed by: Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 Dosia Reichardt Mckitterick, David, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; hardback; pp. xi, 311; 44 b/w illustrations; RRP £45; ISBN 052182690. David McKitterick's book is an important addition to the recent scholarship that has challenged the idea of clearly defined communicative shifts which can be sliced up by date so that oral, manuscript, print and electronic cultures neatly succeed each other. McKitterick's argument, advanced through detailed research into the technology of print, is that it took four centuries for this new technology to become fully absorbed into the social fabric. The complementary nature of print and manuscript well into the seventeenth century is stressed. In this respect his work complements that of other scholars, such as Harold Love, Henry Woudhuysen and Leah Price whose The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel for instance, shows that the commonplace book survived long after its supposed demise in the Early Modern period. McKitterick's analysis effectively begins in the second chapter where the relationship between manuscript and print in early printed books is examined with many detailed examples. Interesting questions such as the establishment of the authority of print are raised, but sometimes subsumed beneath specific case histories. However, it is refreshing to note that McKitterick's scholarship includes developments on the continent, placing the history of publishing in England in a wider context. European bibliophiles, authors and printers inhabit these pages and the author also looks at music publishing – an integral part of the publication and circulation of much poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and one which has been mostly ignored or sidelined. The book contains some well-chosen illustrations, most of which are to be found in a chapter devoted to the production of images in print. The strategies adopted by printers to respond to book buyers' demands and budgets in respect [End Page 235] of illustrated volumes are well documented while McKitterick undermines the assumption that a text or image is ever stable, or reproduced exactly. He goes on to examine the reactions of authors and readers to the instability of printed texts, although the subject of plagiarism as an adjunct to the concept of the author with an economic relationship with his text vanishes under a discussion of typography. Other as yet unexamined issues are tantalizingly raised, but require perhaps another volume. Why, for instance, did printers in the eighteenth century start to distance themselves from readers and cease publishing addresses to them? As McKitterick moves through time towards the modern book, produced at high speed and with accuracy, he raises another fascinating point: that to punctuate is to interpret (as the volume of scholarship on the punctuation of the final stanza of Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn testifies). Here, however, McKitterick confines himself to historical detail about the printer's predicament and he avoids moving into the realm of McLuhan, making no comment about the effect of regularized punctuation on conformity, on habits of thought, or on any links with the Industrial Revolution. The author maintains his position as a historical biographer and leaves the implications of his work on cultural theory for others to explore. As a reference book for anyone working in related fields McKitterick's work is splendid, though perhaps too specialized for the general reader. Throughout there is a sense of nostalgia for the imperfections of early-printed material: the bibliophile's delight in flaw and variation. Vandalism towards books (a continuous phenomenon) is a recurring theme and provides a thought-provoking introductory chapter in which McKitterick asks us to consider the active destruction of our past through ignorance of the nature of our printed inheritance. By showing that manuscript culture was not immediately swamped by print McKitterick indicates that print in its turn can coexist with the new electronic media. His book is a timely warning for those who are too eager to substitute 'new lamps for old'. Dosia Reichardt English James Cook University Copyright © 2005 the author

The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (review)

REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS283 d'en devenir fou » (114). De même, lorsque Bokobza Kahan relève avec justesse à quel point le personnage libertin s'applique à « construire des rôles à l'instar du comédien le plus consommé », c'est pour en conclure à« l'éclatement schizoide » (112). Mais, demandera-t-on, n'est-ce pas réduire alors un fait de civilisation à la singularité d'une structure psychique pathologique, surtout si l'on considère que le brouillage entre les sphères de l'être et du paraître, bien loin de spécifier le libertin, constitue plutôt un trait caractéristique des sociétés de cour ? On remarquera enfin qu'entre la thèse de doctorat et l'ouvrage qui en est tiré, une même hâte semble avoir présidé à la relecture d'un manuscrit que, parfois, dépare la reprise des mêmes citations—à la page 30 et à la page 46, par exemple. Marc André Bernier Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières Leah Price. The Anthology and the Rise ofthe Novel: From Richardson to GeorgeEliot Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Paperback, 2003. 232pp. UKl7.99. ISBN 0-521-53939-0. In The Anthology and the Rise ofthe Novel, Leah Price offers a richly detailed view of the novel, the anthology, and compendiums, situating them as responses to shifting ideas of audience, reading practices, and generic conventions . While Price's focus is on anthologies and other edited forms, there is a related attention to skipping: what readers will skip over and skip to, and how authors and editors sought to discourage or facilitate such skipping through various devices, from instructional prefaces to adaptations and collections ofexcerpts that compactly provide the essentials of the text. The novel is crucial to this study, in part, because ofits heteroglossic form: combining plot with ideas, and incorporating fragments of verse and drama through mottoes, quotations, and other interpolations, the novel puts genrespecific reading practices at odds with each other. As Price demonstrates, plot is generally associated with a linearity that tempts the reader to skip rapidly towards the conclusion, while sentiments and ideas are identified with a lingering that fosters contemplation. She persuasively argues that the value attached to such lingering shifted in relation to that ofskipping through the plot: in the eighteenth century, the valorization of lingering over skipping led to the production of myriad volumes that collected maxims and sentiments from Samuel Richardson's novels; by the next century, in part because of a conceptual division of readers by class and gender, lingering had 284 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:2 dwindled to mere "loitering" (151). After a brief introduction, the study proceeds to a chapter on Richardson that concludes with a coda on Sir Walter Scott, who paves the way for the second chapter on pedagogically inflected miscellanies and Romantic-era novelists such as Ann Radcliffe and Susan Ferner; in the third and final chapter, Price extends her discussion of the novel and the materiality of print to situate Eliot's novels within the reading cultures of the Victorian era. In the first chapter, Price addresses a range ofissues related to anthologies and compendiums. Drawing on an impressive array of abridgments and collections ofexcerpts from Richardson's Clarissa, Price analyses the ways in which such volumes demonstrate a concern in the mid-1700s with die moral perils ofreading quickly for plot and so skipping over the edifying sentiments that occupy the interstices of the action. Price then turns from the pace of readerly consumption to the complication of authorial property raised by such edited versions: "within a model of literary property that assigns every text to a single author, collaboration can appear nearly as criminal as the 'theft [and] robbery' to which Richardson compares piracy" (38). This discussion leads to Scott, whose novels, Price suggests, mimic the andiology form through their own collection of fragments and thematization of collection through characters who are themselves collectors. The intertextuality ofthe novel is refigured as anthologistic by a pedagogy that stresses the student's command ofkey textual fragments—the founding premise of the second chapter. Price begins the middle chapter by situating the conventional anthology form as a vehicle for the...

The Cabinet of Irish Literature: A Historical Perspective on Irish Anthologies

THE CABINET OF IRISH LITERATURE: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON IRISH ANTHOLOGIES* MARGARET KELLEHER I. THE “CULTURE OF THE EXCERPT” among the flurry of reviews and commentaries that followed the publication of volumes I to III of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, those of most enduring interest moved beyond the heat of the moment to a more general reflection on the role of anthologies themselves. Francis Mulhern’s 1993 essay, “A Nation, Yet Again” began, for example, with the cautionary pronouncement, by then all too evident, that “[a]nthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics.”1 Mulhern acknowledged that “authored texts of all kinds—poems, novels, plays, reviews, analyses—play more or less telling parts in a theatre of shifting alliances and antagonisms ,” but he argued for the special rhetorical force of anthologies in their “simulation of self evidence.” Here it is as it was: the very fact of re-presentation, flanked by equally selfattesting editorial learning, deters anyone so merely carping as a critic. And so, in principle, whole corpuses, genres, movements and periods can be “finished”— resolved, secured, perfected or, as the case may be, killed off. Anthological initiatives may be purely antiquarian, but more often they are not. As early as 1984, Seamus Deane’s first public mooting of the idea of “a comprehensive anthology” was strongly opposed by poet and critic Eiléan A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON IRISH ANTHOLOGIES 68 * Research for this article was conducted during my year as John J. Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College. I am also indebted to John Atteberry, Andrew Carpenter, Claire Connolly, Robin Lydenberg, Lucy McDiarmid, Kevin O’Neill, and Gemma Kelleher for their assistance. 1 Francis Mulhern, ‘A Nation, Yet Again,’ review of Vols. I–III of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, in Radical Philosophy 65 (Autumn 1993), 23. Ní Chuilleanáin.2 And immediately after FDA’s publication in 1991, she presented one of the most memorably discomfiting evaluations: It is the trap of all anthologies: by “defining,” that is excluding, they create a false inclusiveness in which the invisible exiles somehow do not count. Every claim to comprehensiveness is thus a devaluing of difference and so of the reality of a literary culture, past or present... . It is not the wrong choices or the predominance of pressure groups over individual talents , or the sexism—all of which are so evident—but the turning away of attention from the ground where the action is happening to the figures of the international talent-spotters half-visible behind their glassed-in gallery.3 Read from an international perspective, the Irish debate about anthologization and its omissions may appear a very late entry into the AngloAmerican canon wars of the 1980s. On the other hand, the above reflections anticipate increasing recent attention to the anthology as a distinct literary genre, attention evident in works such as Barbara Benedict’s Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (1996), Anne Ferry’s Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (2001), and Leah Price’s The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (2000). Overall, these investigations share an investment in the significance of the anthology—viewed most positively by Ferry who claims that its influence can be discerned “in virtually all the revisionary moments in literary history since the sixteenth century.”4 The study of anthologies recently entered into a rare level of media coverage of a young academic’s career; in November 2002 a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times reported a “bidding war” between Harvard and UCLA over Leah Price, a scholar of Victorian literature. Sardonically, the reporter remarked that her specializations included “the role played by— gasp—abridgements in the role of the novel.”5 Yet Price’s engaging study of the anthology’s role in the rise of the novel—a genre that, as she shows, forms a test case “within a culture of the excerpt”—is explicitly informed by the current economics of publishing. She notes that because much of A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON IRISH ANTHOLOGIES 69 2 See Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, review of Heroic Styles: The Tradition...