ABSTRACT

George Gissing, who was born in the heyday of the Victorian era and died at the dawn of the twentieth century, is now seen as an integral part of the cultural landscape of the fin de siecle, but his position within this landscape remains a peculiar one. Unlike Hardy, say, or Conrad, whose place on the cusp of modernism also rested on their marginality, his edgy position as the voice of the 'unclassed' is as shifting and unstable as the social and cultural identities and tensions that he dramatizes. Gissing, perhaps more than any late nineteenth-century writer, has attracted a particular kind of biographical criticism - and this is not surprising given how the experience of 'exile', and the liminal position of the intellectual with which he grappled during his life, lie at the narrative centre of so many of his novels. At the same time his profile has taken on new shapes for successive generations of critics, and the way in which he speaks to the readers who have rediscovered and reinvented him maps the history of cultural criticism and theory over the last thirty years, stretches its boundaries and exposes some of its crucial contours. Gissing himself stressed the need to historicize the conditions which shape a writer's work, position and 'public', both in New Grub Street and in his study of Dickens, and while critics have highlighted the contexts - cultural, political and discursive - that shape the parameters of his writing and the paradigms for reading it, he does not passively fit into any of them. For Gissing intervenes, speaks backs to his readers as he dramatizes the successive cultural and social 'crises' of the 1880s and 90s: crises of class relations, culture, and social transformation; of new patterns and technologies of literary production as an aspect of consumer capitalism; of gender divisions and relationships; of late imperialism and global capitalism. Here we will not attempt to follow all aspects of that conversation, but highlight some key moments, starting with the 1960s and 1970s, before we introduce the essays that make up the present volume.