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

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\u27s 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: \u27So why pick on Middlemarch?, He answers: \u27a 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\u27 (2). The defensive (twice repeated) claim that \u27there is no default industrial publishing format that is somehow free of commercialism\u27 (3, 10), can hardly be shocking or even controversial. And it is not always clear against whom Frost is arguing, but the book\u27s originality, as he says, is \u27its 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\u27 (7). To achieve this \u27optic\u27, 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\u27s novels sustained the Blackwood publishing house after her death, he writes: \u27What maintained Blackwood\u27s trade throughout the remainder of the century was Eliot\u27s immensely serious aesthetic investigation of truth in art. The core of Blackwood\u27s commercial venture was fed by an aesthetic impulse\u27 (9). Furthermore, he claims, Eliot\u27s determination to write without commercial concerns did not extend to subsequent \u27cheap\u27 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\u27s sustained account of this phenomenon in Genres of the Credit Economy (2008)