Collected Articles On George Gissing

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.

Compiled in one book, the essential collection of books by George Gissing: Born in Exile By the Ionian Sea The Crown of Life Demos The Emancipated Eve's Ransom The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories In the Year of Jubilee A Life's Morning The Nether World New Grub Street The Odd Women Our Friend the Charlatan The Paying Guest The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft The Town Traveller Veranilda The Whirlpool

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.

For many years, the only Gissing letters available to the public were those in the modest selection of letters to his family published in 1927. In the following years a good number were published separately in such places as journals, memoirs, and sales catalogues, but like the single and small groups of unpublished letters scattered in libraries around the world, they remained in practical terms inaccessible. Even though in recent years small groups of letters to individual correspondents have come into print, the rapidly growing numbers of Gissing readers and scholars now feel the need for access to his letters in an edition comparable to those of his contemporary novelist friends, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. In this edition, all the Gissing letters that could be found, published and unpublished, have been brought together from all known sources: private and public collections, journals, newspapers, memoirs, biographies, and sales catalogues. The important advantage is not only that they have at last been brought together, but also that they are placed chronologically and given a uniform editorial context which provides a coherence lacking in letters separately published. A significant feature of this edition is that it also contains, whenever they are available, letters to Gissing which are of great help in recording his life during the times when his own letters have been lost or destroyed. With the recent publication of Gissing's diary, his commonplace book, and other smaller pieces, this edition becomes the final major publication of Gissing papers known to exist, and certainly the most significant record of his life, his mind, and his art. It will be of crucial importance to any future biographers, and of the greatest value to those who want to study Gissing's novels in relation to his life.

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.