ABSTRACT
Gilbert Phelps’s study of Turgenev and Gissing in The Russian Novel in English Fiction, after having thus announced the manifest difference between the form of Turgenev’s and Gissing’s fiction, finds itself committed, by its early use of the term ‘influence’, to a hunt for derivations of character, theme and situation from the work of the one writer in that of the other. Phelps is obliged to stretch that already loose concept to breaking point in order to try and demonstrate the fact of Turgenev’s extraordinary importance for Gissing.
