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REVIEWS 349 Barbara M. Benedict. Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 252pp. US$39.95. ISBN 0-691-02578-9. Margaret Anne Doody. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. xxii + 580pp. ISBN 0-8135-2168-8. Margaret Anne Doody's The True Story ofthe Novel and Barbara M. Benedict's Making the Modern Reader might seem to have little in common as works of literary history and criticism. Benedict carefully defines for herself a circumscribed body of material and a clear purpose and perspective. She follows a fairly orthodox method and cites a commanding but predictable body of scholarship, employing the familiar "objective" tone of much academic discourse. Doody, in contrast, takes as her subject fiction in all times and places, refers to a dazzling range of theorists and critics concerned with matters sometimes apparently tangential to her own concerns, and by her title explicitly claims for her highly personal opinions the authority of "truth." Yet both books depend on an assumption manifest in much recent literary history: that we need now to look at new texts in order to understand familiar ones. Both critics focus on specific genres and demand for those genres special kinds of attention. Benedict's book concludes with a six-page compilation, in chronological order , of English anthology titles from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—Wits Cabinet: A Companionfor Gentlemen and Ladies to A CommonPlace Book to the Holy Scriptures. The critic appears to have read them all, and she has interesting and provocative things to say about many of them. Analysing the ways that these collections relate to their cultural contexts, she argues that these books not only defined canons but shaped readers' ways of understanding literature's functions and their techniques of reading. During the eighteenth century , anthologies composed of preprinted materials and intended mainly for a new and enlarging middle-class audience both responded to and formed that audience 's taste. Produced for market reasons, these books served the commercial purposes oftheir printers and sellers and the cultural needs of their readers. Their changing nature reflects shifting assumptions about taste and about pedagogy. Tracing the development of anthologies from the late Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, Benedict tells a story of decreasing reader autonomy. PreRestoration collections ("anthologies, commonplace books, courtesy literature, and English reference and writing manuals," p. 33) demonstrate the movement towards readers' sense of self-definition by means of printed literature. By the time of the Restoration, collections, highly miscellaneous in substance and style, had come to celebrate aesthetic variety, thus implicitly granting readers the right to make their own literary judgments. In the early eighteenth century, anthologists evolved a distinct set of values (beginning with "elegance") that placed readers in the role of discriminating consumers of art; a few years later, powerful critics and booksellers provided rankings of authors, enjoining or assuming their readers' assent to a proclaimed critical consensus. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, moral improvement had become the implicit or explicit function of reading, and collections fostered that aim. 350 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:3 Such a summary outlines the large argument of Making the Modern Reader, but it does not convey the book's real strength, which depends on its attentiveness to individual texts. Benedict examines carefully the contents of the diverse collections she considers, finding common elements in diversity but also respecting difference. Thus a·chapter provocatively titled "Reading and Heteroglossia in the Restoration" demonstrates in detail the ways in which early anthologies articulate "opposing cultural traditions and voices within one context" (p. 73), sometimes even promoting variety where none really exists. Printers might issue collections of political verse and insist that readers pay attention to literary form rather than to content. They encouraged the audience to see sexual meanings in the political and political ones in sexual verse. One anthology, organized , Benedict claims, to induce "aesthetic comparisons" (p. 74), includes six poems evoking the figure of someone named "Celia," a fact that can hardly fail to make the reader ponder literary conjunctions. Benedict even examines differences between editions of the...

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