Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
The Gissing Journal
Author: New Grub Street
Author: George GissingPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
A Man of Many Parts
Author: Barbara RawlinsonPublisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042020857
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Book Description
This comprehensive study of George Gissing's short stories and related non-fiction is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century realism. For the first time readers will be able to follow the development which transformed Gissing's unremarkable early stories into the very individual tales that elevated his work to the vanguard of realistic short fiction. Gissing's American period is notable for its accumulation of themes that were repeatedly refined and adapted for his later work, causality emerging as the dominant voice. On his return to England, shifting political and philosophical beliefs expressed in his non-fiction had a vital impact on his second phase of short fiction, and the part played by realism in the author's short stories and his writings on Charles Dickens added further dimensions to his work as a whole. By the final phase of Gissing's remarkable development, it is evident that his interest in the concept of causality as the major force in his short work had been replaced by a more challenging preoccupation with the human psyche. This introduced philosophical, sociological and psychological dimensions to Gissing's work that established him in the field of short fiction as a leading exponent of late nineteenth-century realism
George Gissing
Author: Paul DelanyPublisher: Orion
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 538
Book Description
George Orwell was asked to write a biography of George Gissing, having hailed him as 'perhaps the best novelist England has produced.' He had to refuse, and instead of a book like this one, Orwell wrote a novel, 1984. His closeness to Gissing can help draw the map of English literature from 1880 to 1950. Orwell was born in the year that Gissing died, 1903. Both of them lived 46 years and died of lung disease. It is likely that Orwell borrowed the first name of his pseudonym from Gissing. Orwell, though, chose to live among the poor to begin a lifelong commitment to leftist politics. Gissing became poor by bad luck and bad judgement; he came to believe that political solutions were unlikely to abolish human misery, and declared that the great subject of his novels was the situation of educated people with 'not enough money.' Paul Delany's has read Gissing's 22 novels, and his other works, with a fine biographer's eye. Gissing was a neurotic writer, and everything in his later life was determined by the twin disasters of his imprisonment and his marriage to Nell Harrison. Prison he concealed altogether. It could be argued that Victorian society rested on hypocrisy, requiring everyone to lie about their desires. But the major figures in Gissing's novels are almost always bad liars. In his own case a mistake in youth created daily misery that he could never shake off. Yet Gissing the novelist gives us better than anyone the flavour of London in the 1880s and 1890s: a compound of wet streets, fog, coal-smoke, narrow horizons, and an imagination equal to it all. In Paul Delany he has found the perfect biographer.
The Fiction of George Gissing
Author: Lewis D. MoorePublisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786452153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
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.
The Odd Women
Author: George GissingPublisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770488286
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact of ‘odd’ or ‘redundant’ women, the cultural impact of ‘the new woman,’ and the opportunities for and conditions of employment in the expanding service sector of the economy. At the heart of these issues as many late Victorians saw them was a problem of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women in the population. There were more females than males, which meant that more and more women would be left unmarried; they would be ‘odd’ or ‘redundant,’ and would be forced to be independent and to find work to support themselves. In the Broadview edition, Gissing’s text is carefully annotated and accompanied by a range of documents from the period that help to lay out the context in which the book was written. In Gissing’s story, Virginia Madden and her two sisters are confronted upon the death of their father with sudden impoverishment. Without training for employment, and desperate to maintain middle-class respectability, they face a daunting struggle. In Rhoda Nunn, a strong feminist, Gissing also presents a strong character who draws attention overtly to the issues behind the novel. The Odd Women is one of the most important social novels of the late nineteenth century.
George Gissing
Author: Pierre CoustillasPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136174656
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 583
Book Description
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.
The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I
Author: Pierre CoustillasPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317304098
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Book Description
This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing chronologically and in close detail. Part I covers Gissing’s early life up until his establishment as a writer of moderate critical success.
The Odd Women
Author: George GissingPublisher: e-artnow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
The Odd Women is a Victorian novel which deals with themes such as the role of women in society, marriage, morals and the early feminist movement. There was the notion in Victorian England that there was an excess of one million women over men. This meant there were "odd" women left over at the end of the equation when the other men and women had paired off in marriage. A cross-section of women dealing with this problem are described in "The Odd Women" and it can be inferred that their lifestyles also set them apart as odd in the sense of strange.
Journal of a Sad Hermaphrodite
Author: Michael De LarrabeitiPublisher:
ISBN: 9780955462245
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Book Description
Nearing the age of retirement Cooper is an eccentric teacher of English in a small county town. Celibate, apprehensive and unadventurous he yet carries within him a powerful passion - a love of words for their own sake and a devotion to poetry. In the course of his teaching Cooper communicates this passion to one of his students; they begin to meet secretly, and in her Cooper discovers the gift for writing that he has yearned for all his life but is certain he does not possess. But the small world of the county town mistakes a literary affair for a carnal one and a scandal develops. In a gesture of defiance the young woman sends her diary of the year to Cooper and he at last learns her true feelings, but it is all too late and the supposed lovers are parted. Initially dismayed by this turn of events Cooper decides to arrange the girl's diary into its separate moods of Autumn, Winter and Spring. Then, having done the same for a commonplace-book he has kept for many years, he sets about weaving the two strands together to form a story - a web of poems and prose, dreams and desires, regrets and memories. So just when it seems that nothing lies before him but loneliness and despair, he finds instead that he has created his first book. Journal of a Sad Hermaphrodite is Michael de Larrabeiti's masterpiece, available for the first time in over fifteen years.