Gissing and the City

Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late-Victorian England

J. Spiers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9781349546558
  9781403997722
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230524453
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Why does Gissing Matter?
• 1. New Woman on Grub Street: Art in the City
• 2. Buildings, Residences, and Mansions: George Gissing's 'prejudice against flats'
• 3. Gissing's Saturnalia: Urban Crowds, Carnivalesque Subversion and the Crisis of Paternal Authority
• 4. Gissing, Literary Bohemia, and the Metropolitan Circle
• 5. Between Dreamworlds and Real Worlds: Gissing's London
• 6. 'Citizens of London?' Working Women, Leisure and Urban Space in Gissing's 1880s Fiction
• 7. 'Counter-jumpers' and 'Queens of the Street': The Shop Girl of Gissing and his Contemporaries
• 8. Rebellion in the Metropolis: George Gissing's New Woman Musician
• 9. 'Children of the Street': Reconfiguring Gender in Gissing's London
• 10. 'Woman as an Invader': Travel and Travail in George Gissing's The Odd Women
• 11. The Clash of Space and Culture: Gissing and the Rise of the 'New' Suburban
• 12. 'Muddy depths': The Thames in Gissing's Fiction
• 13. 'Amid the Dear Old Horrors': Memory, London, and Literary Labour in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
• 14. Gissing's Urban Neurasthenia
• 15. In Public: George Gissing, Newspapers and the City
• 16. George Gissing's Scrapbook: A Storehouse of 'Elements of Drama to be Fused and Minted in his Brain'
• 17. Gissing: A Life in Death - A Cavalcade of Gissing Criticism in the Last Hundred Years