George Gissing and the Woman Question Convention and Dissent [Hardcover]

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.Contents: Introduction: George Gissing and the woman question, Simon J. James and Christine Huguet; Part I Gissings Complex Discourse of (New) Womanhood: Gissing and prostitution, David Grylls; Gissing and women in the 1890s: the conditions and consequences of narrative sympathy, Constance D. Harsh; Gissings failed new men: masculinity in The Odd Women, Tara MacDonald; Gissings Nell: her body and his text, Roger Milbrandt; At high pressure? The spinster and the costs of independence in Gissings short stories, 1894-1903, Emma Liggins; Domesticity and discipline in Gissings short fiction, Rosemary Jann; Its ard on a feller: female violence and the culture of refinement in Gissings The Nether World, Anthony Patterson. Part II Gissings Voice: A Comparatist Assessment: What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists?: the metaliterary ghost in The Odd Women, Cristina Ceron; Rewriting the al#´