First Published in 1968. In the English literary production of the eighteen eighties and nineties, George Gissing stands as an important figure. The rising interest in him since the centenary of his birth in 1957 is efficiently consolidating his very substantial claim to be reckoned as a significant novelist of the late Victorian period. In this selection of essays, stress has been laid almost exclusively on criticism, but biographical clues are frequently given in the pieces reprinted. This title aims to bring new students into touch with the novelist's works.
Approaching its subject both contextually and comparatively, George Gissing and the Woman Question reads Gissing's novels, short stories and personal writings as a crux in European fiction's formulations of gender and sexuality. The collection places Gissing alongside nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors as diverse as Paul Bourget, Ella Hepworth Dixon, May Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, theorizing the ways in which late-Victorian sexual difference is challenged, explored and performed in Gissing's work. In addition to analyzing the major novels, essays make a case for Gissing as a significant short story writer and address Gissing's own life and afterlife in ways that avoid biographical mimetics. The contributors also place Gissing's work in relation to discourses of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, identity, public space, class and labour, especially literary production. Increasingly viewed as a key chronicler of the late Victorian period's various redefinitions of sexual difference, Gissing is here recognized as a sincere, uncompromising chronicler of social change.
Once seen as a relatively marginal figure, George Gissing (1857-1903) persists in sparking interest among new generations of radical critics who continue to be inspired by his work and to develop fresh approaches to it. This essay collection, bringing together British, European, and North American literary critics and cultural historians with diverse specialities and interests, demonstrates the range of contemporary perspectives through which his fiction can be viewed. Offering both closely contextualized historical readings and broader cultural and philosophical assessments, the contributions will engage not only the specialist but those interested in the diverse themes that absorbed Gissing: the cultural and social formation of class and gender, social mobility and its unsettling effects on individual and collective identities, the place of writing in emerging mass culture, and the possibilities and limits of fiction as critical intervention.
The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.
Most of George Gissing's 23 novels have a certain air of autobiography, despite Gissing's frequent arguments that his fictional plots bear little resemblance to his own life and experiences. Starting with Workers in the Dawn (1880), almost all of Gissing's fictional works are set in his own time period of late-Victorian England, and five of his first six novels focus on the working-class poor that Gissing would have encountered frequently during his early writing career. While most recent criticism focuses on Gissing's works as biographical narratives, this work approaches Gissing's novels as purely imaginative works of art, giving him the benefit of the doubt regardless of how well his books seem to match up with the events of his own life. By analyzing important themes in his novels and recognizing the power of the artist's imagination, especially through the critical works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, the author reveals how Gissing's novels present a lived feel of the world Gissing knew firsthand. The author asserts that, at most, Gissing used his personal experiences as a starting point to transform his own life and thoughts into stories that explain the social, personal, and cultural significance of such experiences.
This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing both chronologically and in close detail. This final volume in Coustillas’s prodigious biography examines the turbulent last years of the author’s life and his literary afterlife.
In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication of their diaries was a real possibility that they either coveted or feared. Millim locates the diary at the intersection of the public and private spheres to show that well-known writers and public figures of both sexes exploited the diary's self-reflexive, diurnal structure in order to enhance their creativity and establish themselves as authors. Their object was to manage, rather than to indulge or repress, their emotions for the purposes of perfecting their observational and critical skills. Reading these diaries as literary works in their own right, Millim analyses their crucial role in the construction of authorship. By relating these Victorian writers' diaries to their publications and to contemporary works of cultural criticism, Millim shows the multifarious ways in which diaristic practices, emotional management and professional output corresponded to experiences of the literary marketplace and to nineteenth-century codes of propriety.
