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.

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.

Comme pour l'anglais du XXe siècle finissant, la Ville - qu'il s'agisse de Londres ou des cités industrielles du Nord - était pour les sujets de la reine Victoria à la fois un paradis et un enfer. Peu d'écrivains de l'époque l'ont méconnue; ils ont, selon leur culture, leur sensibilité, leur tempérament, réagi de façons contradictoires à un phénomène d'une ampleur sans précédent, qui a été, et demeure, au centre des débats politiques et sociaux. Les essais contenus dans ce volume reflètent la variété des attitudes victoriennes envers l'urbanisation. Ils évoquent les dures réalités de la misère et de la corruption, les conclusions des enquêtes menées dans un labyrinth où trouvaient place aussi bien la criminalité qu'une culture nouvelle; mais ils montrent aussi la magie de la ville, "douce cité d'illusion, de mythes, d'aspirations et de cauchemars", qui, selon Jonathan Raban, est aussi réelle, sinon plus, que la cité perceptible dans les statistiques et les études des sociologues, des démographes et des architectes. Les principaux auteurs traités sont Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Frederic Harrison, George Gissing, Arthur Morrison et Rudyard Kipling. Les six essais qui leur sont consacrés sont précédés d'un essai plus général écrit par un spécialiste reconnu de la civilisation urbaine britannique. L'ensemble entend apporter un complément original aux études parues sur la question en Angleterre depuis une douzaine d'années. Il reflète l'ambiguïté des jugements humains devant un phénomène tangible, émminemment analysable, dont procèdent de multiples visions subjectives et substantielles.

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.

This collection explores Gissing’s place in the narrative of fin-de-siècle literature. Together, chapters here theorise how late-Victorian spatial and generic norms are confronted, explored and performed in Gissing’s works. In addition to presenting new readings of the major novels and introducing readers to lesser-known works, the collection advocates Gissing’s importance as a journalist, short story, and travel writer. It also recognises Gissing as a central proponent in the late-Victorian realism debate. The book, like today’s nineteenth-century studies, is interdisciplinary. It includes familiar interpretive approaches—biographical, historicist, and comparative—together with fresh perspectives informed by ecocriticism, materiality, and cultural performance. In addition, it is markedly comparative in scope. Gissing is read alongside familiar authors like Dickens, Ruskin, and Hardy, but also, and more unusually, Nietzsche, Besant, Freud and Foucault. Collectively, these chapters illustrate that Gissing, though attentive to contemporary issues, is neither uncomplicatedly realist nor are his writings uncomplicated historical records of place.