The Victorian Period

This chapter has five sections: 1. General and Prose, including Dickens; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals, Publishing History, and Drama; 5. Miscellaneous. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke; section 3 is by Sally Blackburn-Daniels; sections 4 and 5 are by William Baker. In somewhat of a departure from previous accounts, this chapter concludes with a mixed-genre section that covers Samuel Butler Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, George Gissing, Richard Jefferies, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. This is followed by a section containing additional materials that came too late to be included elsewhere. These sections have been contributed by William Baker, who thanks for their assistance Dominic Edwards, Olaf Berwald, Beth Palmer, Sophie Ratcliffe, and Caroline Radcliffe.

“Self-sacrifice may be Quite Wrong”: Women’s Education and Finances in The Odd Women (1893) by George Gissing

In late-nineteenth-century Britain, the surplus number of single women presented an internal crisis that accumulated in a number of debates on the subject in various fields, such as economy and education. While much have been written about these in relation to the social context of the time, little have been said specifically about the way single women and their educational and financial positions are presented in late-nineteenth-century English novels. This paper focusses on George Gissing’s (1857-1903) novel The Odd Women (1893) and its portrayal of single women and the parallel roles played by money and education in the women’s decision to remain unmarried. The method applied in this study is based on contextual as well as textual analyses and interpretation of the novel in light of feminist and Marxist literary theories. This study investigates the impact of socio-economic conditions on the lives of single women towards the end of the nineteenth century. The result of this study shows the novel makes a correlation between women’s level of education and financial situation with their choice to remain single.

XIIIThe Victorian Period

This chapter has six sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3.Poetry; 4. Periodicals and Publishing History; 5. Drama; 6. Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre. Section 1 is by Kristen Pond with the assistance of Elizabeth Parker; section 2 is by Lois Burke with the assistance of Ana Alicia Garza, who writes on Dickens; section 3 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 4 is by Helen Williams; section 5 is by Caroline Radcliffe; section 6 is by William Baker. In a departure from previous years, and in order to avoid confusion as to who has contributed what to this chapter, section 6 contains material on George Borrow, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and Richard Jefferies previously found in the General and Prose section, and on Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Meredith, Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Walter Pater previously found in other sections. Also included in section 6 are miscellaneous and cross-genre items and additional items that arrived too late to be included elsewhere in this chapter. Thanks for assistance with this chapter must go to Dominic Edwards, Nancy S. Weyant, the bibliographer of Mrs Gaskell, and Patrick Scott.

No Home-Like Place: Delusions of Home in Born in Exile

George Gissing was obsessed with the question of ‘home’, in his own restless mobility as well as that of his characters, whose domestic circumstances he invariably enumerated in detail. Gissing's Born in Exile moves between real and fictional locations in London, Exeter, and the industrial north of England, but also between a variety of lodgings, chambers, and houses which accommodate, constrain, and only occasionally liberate their occupants. Their contradictory and volatile attitudes to these ‘homes’ parallel Gissing's unstable reactions to his own lodgings and highlight the relative nature of locations between town and country as well as differences in perception of the same physical surroundings. Descriptions of and debates about ‘home’ in Born in Exile provide a prelude to Gissing's later, more dogmatic pronouncements in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, also penned – in fiction – from the perspective of the country around Exeter.

Coda

The Coda discusses the changing representations of tenancy after Dickens’s death in 1870. It moves through the fin de siècle, offerings readings of novellas by Wilkie Collins and tracing Dickens’s legacy in these texts. Collins’s novellas use rented space as a prism through which to address broad concerns about modernity. The Coda briefly notes the role of rented space in works by George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. It concludes by shifting its focus to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and considers examples from literature, film, television, and contemporary installation art, including Tatzu Nishi’s 2002 project, Villa Victoria.

George Gissing: A Story of English Realism

George Gissing’s novels sit on the permeable boundary between the diegetic tendencies of 19th-century realism and the mimesis-dominated narratives of modernism. In his early novels, characters deliver barely disguised narratorial comments directly to the reader. But this form of realism is already strained. The self-awareness of Gissing’s art, manifesting in satire and irony, butts up against his research-led approach to writing. This article shows that what emerges in Gissing is a conflict between narrative intrusion, and the desire to displace authority and represent subjectivity at its broadest. This conflict is a synecdoche for proto-modernism.

Dostoevsky in English Literature

There is the task of studying the degree of influence of the famous works of F.M. Dostoevsky on English-language literature and culture in general. Statements are given and the opinion of the great English-speaking literary classics about the works of Dostoevsky and the Russian-language novel is described. The author considers the main critical articles, essays and theses related to the Dostoevsky and his works, written by famous English-speaking novelists and literary critics of that era and the next one. Among them: Matthew Arnold, George Gissing, George Meredith, Oscar Wilde and others. The article describes the interpretation of their opinions about the great Russian writer’s works and on the degree of his influence on the literary trends of his contemporaries. The author gives a comparison between the images of the characters of the Dostoevsky novels and other English-speaking authors, which is sometimes amazing. In addition, the article presents a list of special courses that are currently being studied at universities and colleges in the USA and Great Britain dedicated to Dostoevsky.