Review
"Where other studies have examined the history of the novel in relation to romance, to the rise of the novel or to emergent forms of subjectivity...Leah Price looks at novels in relation to the history of the book, and to the proliferation of anthologies in particular. It is a refreshing change...Her book is rich in insights." London Review of Books

"Fascinating and intricate..." Victorians Institute Journal

"Dazzlingly inventive." Review of English Studies

"Price...brings together book history and narrative theory in subtle ways to reach sometimes surprisingly original and engaging conclusions about the effects anthologizers, abridgers, and republishers have had on the production and form of naratives, particularly women's fiction....The book is unusually well informed by contemporaneous as well as contemporary reviews and criticism. Equally refreshing is the thoughtfulness and frequent wry duality of Price's observations....Essential for any self-respecting academic library..." Choice

"Groundbreaking...utterly brillliant...material history at its best." Wordsworth Circle

"Leah Price's insightful and wide-range 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....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....Price charts a significant shift in attitudes regarding the ways of reading and writing embodied in anthologies....Both the sweep of her argument and the quality of her particular readings make this a very important book about books and their readers." SHARP News

"Richly researched, wonderfully provocative book." Nineteenth-Century Literature

"Meticulous, thoughtful, and original." Eighteenth Century Studies


Book Description
The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel brings together two traditionally antagonistic fields, book history and narrative theory, to challenge established theories of "the rise of the novel." Covering British novelists from Richardson to George Eliot, this study asks why the epistolary novel disappeared, how the book review emerged, and how editors' reproduction of old texts has shaped authors' production of new ones. This provocative book promises to change the way we think about the future of intellectual property, and the role that anthologies play in the classroom.

FROM THE PUBLISHER