“It’s snowing like crazy,” says Sean Shesgreen. Reached by phone in frigid Illinois, the scholar is in a library carrel, ready to talk about another storm brewing. A murmur is growing about Shesgreen’s “Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” just released in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2009) after a long gestation.
In June 2004, Shesgreen, a professor of English at Northern Illinois University, went to Ithaca, N.Y., to visit M.H. Abrams, one of the grand eminences of American letters, 92 at the time, and a professor emeritus at Cornell University. Abrams is an acclaimed scholar of the Romantic era who for more than 40 years was the general editor for the NAEL, a book that some reviewers have called the “canon of canons” and the “sine qua non of college textbooks” and whose influence Jeffrey J. Williams described in an article in the April 18, 2008, issue of The Chronicle Review. In the course of an earlier phone interview, Abrams had invited Shesgreen to look at files for materials related to the anthology’s first edition, and in Ithaca he gave the visitor permission to copy what he wished. Shesgreen says he was disappointed to find only a few letters related to the early years and “one was about lunch.” But in files on revisions to the anthology he found a wealth of material, often printed-out e-mail messages, shedding light, he says, on the NAEL’s business of canon-making and the tactics it has used to maintain its “hegemony.”
It took a few years to decide how to craft an essay about that “big kitchen sink of stuff.” He found some free time before he started a visiting professorship at Stanford University and says that he wrote and received permission anew from Abrams in June 2007 to quote from the materials.
The essay begins with a historical section on the NAEL’s origins, which as a project was initiated by Norton first with one team of scholars, under the Shakespearean Alfred Harbage at Harvard University, and when that fell through, under a second team led by Abrams. Shesgreen links the 1962 anthology’s success to a range of factors — technical, commercial, and scholarly. Thin “Bible paper” allowed the first NAEL, he writes, to “bulk up” to 1,792 pages, which was over 60 percent more than a main competitor, The College Survey of English Literature. Yet the NAEL’s first hardcover, he says, weighed 25 percent less than the Survey, 2.6 pounds against 3.35 pounds. The additional pages allowed for a single-column format in the NAEL, and a switch from quarto to octavo sizing for the book gave it an easier hand feel.
Shesgreen also details Abrams’s innovations in comparison to existing anthologies like the College Survey. Abrams, he says, respected students as “aspiring scholars, creating sophisticated historical introductions, biographical narratives, and innovative special topics.” But elsewhere in the essay he argues that Abrams’s influence has had negative elements, for example his resistance to expanding the early limited number of female writers in the NAEL’s pages. In the article, Shesgreen quotes Abrams as saying during the 2004 visit, “I have not found 10 lines worth reading in any of the women added. People want these but don’t use them. And we have to put them in to be PC.”
If Abrams was frank in conversation about some matters, on issues of sales and royalties he was “elusive,” says Shesgreen, who says that Abrams gets a “double cut” as general editor and as a “period editor” for the Romantic age. In fairness to the senior scholar, he writes, “the formula that determines how the NAEL’s academic editors get paid is complex and changing.” Shesgreen makes a stab at describing the vesting system for period editors of the anthology and estimating their royalties (he invites corrections).
The bottom line in Shesgreen’s estimates is that fully vested period editors earn about $84,000 a year off the anthology, or $600,000, he says, over the seven-year life of an edition, something that makes millionaires out of editors vested for two editions. If accurate, not bad for labors in the literary trenches.
Some of Shesgreen’s interest in the NAEL as a business venture grew, the scholar says, from a course on literary studies that he has taught for sophomores intending to be English majors. “I would bring in the anthology,” Shesgreen recalls, “and I would slap it on the desk, and I would say, ‘This is the canon.’” This would provoke questions, he says, of who makes a canon, followed by an examination of Norton’s roster, revealing editors from elite universities “leavened” — Shesgreen’s term — by scholars from flagship state universities. This he casts as a calculated marketing technique aimed at public universities with the vast student populations and vast course adoption sales that have made the real money for Norton. “I am very interested in social class in the United States,” says the scholar, whose tones retain the mark of his youth in the north of Ireland.
The dominant NAEL dodged a bullet, he says, when the new Oxford Anthology of English Literature received a scathing review, “The Corpus Laid Out: English Literature for the Container Age,” in the November 2, 1973, issue of the Times Literary Supplement. But a more dogged foe emerged more than two decades later with the first edition of the Longman Anthology of British Literature. Shesgreen traces Norton editors’ efforts to obtain an advance copy of the Longman table of contents, with ultimate success, and with espionage imagery in the in-house e-mail messages. At one point, Shesgreen suggests, it is not clear who is imitating whom. “Is Longman imitating the NAEL imitating Longman?” Questioned on what the result of such a cycle might be for the teaching of English literature, Shesgreen laments a process of homogenization, “a convergence based upon a desire to preserve the hegemony and place, importance, and supremacy of the Norton.” You’re looking at “a whole range of generics, although you shouldn’t use the word ‘range’ when you talk about generics.” Academics deserve “sharper, broader, and keener” choices. “You can have all these arguments about canon until the cows come home,” Shesgreen says. “But canon is really determined by something very different. It is not determined by ideologies that are debated at the MLA. It is determined by economic and material principles.”
“Every book lives a double life,” he writes in the article. “One is public and visible. The other is private and invisible, sometimes even carefully cloaked at great effort or expense.” The scholar hoped, he says, to “dispel some of the mist” around the NAEL and “by extension books like it.”
Contacted for a response to the essay, W.W. Norton’s president, Drake McFeely, is forceful: “This would be a minor annoyance if not for the fact that it concerns our most important publication. I see the article as an embarrassment to Professor Shesgreen. I was surprised that Critical Inquiry, which is an academic journal that I admire a great deal, chose to publish the piece.” He accuses Shesgreen of making errors “too numerous to detail” and of taking advantage of “Mike Abrams’s graciousness and generosity.”
McFeely says Norton has been in touch with Critical Inquiry and he hears that a number of scholars are writing to the journal. “Shesgreen’s main discovery, as best I can tell, is that authors get royalties for their books and that publishers compete with one another. That seems to be the sum total of a sort of original insight from the article,” he says, “and beyond that, mainly we’re dealing with gossip and innuendo.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 20, Page B17