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.

About the Author
Christine Huguet is a Senior Lecturer at Universite Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3, France. She has edited volumes of essays on Gissing, George Moore and Charles Dickens. Simon J. James is Professor of Victorian Literature at the Department of English Studies, Durham University, UK. He is the author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing.

Reviews

A Yankee Book Peddler US Core Title for 2013 A Baker & Taylor Literary Essentials Title 'A luminous, wide-ranging examination of the Victorian novelist George Gissing's relation to various issues related to the conditions, concerns, and representation of women in late-Victorian Britain, George Gissing and the Woman Question has numerous strengths, among them a fresh and searching consideration of a number of lesser-known fictional works by Gissing. An indispensable collection for Gissing scholars and critics of nineteenth-century British fiction'. Richard A. Kaye, Hunter College/The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA, author of The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction 'This collection of essays ... in examining Gissing's most important novels and a selection of his short fiction, begin[s] to produce a more holistic picture of the author's portrayals of women and the woman question, without attempting to diminish the complexity or to ignore the variety of those portrayals.' Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

Book Information
ISBN 9780367882242
Author Christine Huguet
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g