George Gissing

by Ryle, Martin H.; Taylor, Jenny Bourne

• ISBN13: 9780754636755
• ISBN10: 0754636755
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-07-31
• Publisher: Ashgate Pub Co

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	vii
General Editors' Preface	ix
Introduction: Gissing's Critical Contexts
Martin Ryle and Jenny Bourne Taylor	1	(14)
1 Blatherwicks and Busybodies: Gissing on the Culture of Philanthropic Slumming
Diana Maltz	15	(14)
2 Her Appearance in Public: Sexual Danger, Urban Space and the Working Woman
Emma Liggins	29	(18)
3 'Just a morsel to stay your appetite': Gissing and the Cultural Politics of Food
Scott McCracken	47	(14)
4 The Strange Case of Godwin Peak: Double Consciousness in Born in Exile
Jenny Bourne Taylor	61	(16)
5 Sex and the City: Gissing, Helmholtz, Freud
David Glover	77	(16)
6 The Discontents of Everyday Life: Civilization and the Pathology of Masculinity in The Whirlpool
Simon J. James	93	(14)
7 Whirlpools of Modernity: European Naturalism and the Urban Phantasmagoria
Deborah Parsons	107	(12)
8 'To show a man of letters': Gissing, Cultural Authority and Literary Modernism
Martin Ryle	119	(14)
9 New Grub Street's Self-Consciousness
Christina Lupton and Tilman Reitz	133	(12)
10 The Voice of the Unclassed: Gissing and Twentieth-Century English Fiction
Patrick Parrinder	145	(14)
Index	159