The Day Of Silence And Other Stories

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development, it is evident that his interest in the concept of causality as the major force in his short work had been replaced by a more challenging preoccupation with the human psyche.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

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 crown upon the continuing vitality and popularity of Gissing studies in the final decade of the twentieth century was the publication of The Collected Letters of George Gissing (1990-97). The editors of that mammoth undertaking, Paul Mattheisen, Arthur Young and Pierre Coustillas, had long been an inspiration to the younger generation of Gissing scholars, and their presence at the International George Gissing Conference at Amsterdam in September 1999 explained the success of the encounter between Gissing's older and younger critics. Ever since the reappraisal of Gissing's works began to get under way in the early 1960s through the publication of many new editions of the works and ground-breaking critical studies by Arthur Young, Jacob Korg and Pierre Coustillas, it has become impossible to ignore the high status he now enjoys by rights, which resembles the position granted to him long ago by his contemporaries, as one of the leading English novelists of the late nineteenth century. This collection of essays is remarkable for its emphasis on women's issues addressed in Gissing's novels, ranging from the inadequate education of women to the struggle for greater female independence, within and without marriage. Several contributors seek to define the precise nature and quality of Gissing's achievement and his place in the canon and, in the process, they open up fascinating, new opportunities for future research.

Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England addresses the late Victorian cultural crisis and aesthetic revolt in urban life, politics, literature and art, by special reference to the experience of the shocks of the new urban environment, and literary and artistic responses. It does so through interdisciplinary discussion of the novels of George Gissing, whose work is particularly linked to 'the city' and the crisis of urban experience, especially in the archetypal modern imperial city.

George Gissing's work reflects his observations of fin-de-siècle London life. Influenced by the French naturalist school, his realist representations of urban culture testify to the significance of the city for the development of new class and gender identities, particularly for women. Liggins's study, which considers standard texts such as The Odd Women, New Grub Street, and The Nether World as well as lesser known short works, examines Gissing's fiction in relation to the formation of these new identities, focusing specifically on debates about the working woman. From the 1880s onward, a new genre of urban fiction increasingly focused on work as a key aspect of the modern woman's identity, elements of which were developed in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s. Showing his fascination with the working woman and her narrative potential, Gissing portrays women from a wide variety of occupations, ranging from factory girls, actresses, prostitutes, and shop girls to writers, teachers, clerks, and musicians. Liggins argues that by placing the working woman at the center of his narratives, rather than at the margins, Gissing made an important contribution to the development of urban fiction, which increasingly reflected current debates about women's presence in the city.

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.