DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Review of The Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch.

Authors

Simon R. Frost

Date of this Version

2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

With excellent research available on the publication history of Middlemarch, including work by John Sutherland, N. N. Feltes, Carol Martin, David Finkelstein and others, it may seem surprising that an entire book has now been devoted to the topic. But as the title of Simon R. Frost's The Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch suggests, this book takes Middlemarch as a case study to illustrate and test some larger theoretical claims and methodological practices. In his introduction, Frost admits that most of the material on Middlemarch has been covered by other critics, but that he hopes to synthesize existing scholarship rather than introduce new material. What can Middlemarch tell us about the business of the novel in nineteenth-century Britain?

Or, as Frost puts it: 'So why pick on Middlemarch?, He answers: 'a work is needed that not only was and still is recognized indisputably as a work of great art, but also one whose form resulted from business strategies pursued by its entrepreneurial author, agent and publisher - whilst displaying a history of successful re-marketing to a variety of professional and nonprofessional readers' (2). The defensive (twice repeated) claim that 'there is no "default" industrial publishing format that is somehow free of commercialism' (3, 10), can hardly be shocking or even controversial. And it is not always clear against whom Frost is arguing, but the book's originality, as he says, is 'its assembly of existing theorized positions together with historical material data into an optic that finds it unproblematic to view published literary novels in industrialized commodity culture as the coordination of aesthetic and economic impulses' (7). To achieve this 'optic', he needs to show that George Eliot had a commitment to a realist aesthetic free from commercial pressures, and that she also at the same time maintained an interest in the sales and marketing of her books. Noting that Eliot's novels sustained the Blackwood publishing house after her death, he writes: 'What maintained Blackwood's trade throughout the remainder of the century was Eliot's immensely serious aesthetic investigation of truth in art. The core of Blackwood's commercial venture was fed by an aesthetic impulse' (9). Furthermore, he claims, Eliot's determination to write without commercial concerns did not extend to subsequent 'cheap' editions or to editions produced for overseas colonial markets (23). These aesthetic and commercial interests, he argues, were not contradictory but rather typical of the production of Victorian novels. His larger point is that literary criticism today must take both the aesthetics of the novel and the material conditions of its production into consideration, rather than separating them into distinct fields of historical and analytic, interpretive inquiry.

The theoretical argument is interesting and potentially relevant to contemporary criticism in that it takes on the relationship between aesthetics and economics, two historically antithetical discourses. Frost excavates the history of how these originally linked discourses became separated by taking us back to the eighteenth century (notably to the writings of Adam Smith). While his theoretical scaffolding is generally sound, a strange omission in his summary of how aesthetic and economic discourses diverged is Mary Poovey's sustained account of this phenomenon in Genres of the Credit Economy (2008).