Introduction

This chapter demonstrates that Gissing's novels also fundamentally resist the definitive categorisation of spaces into binaries, such as the public verses the private, the domestic verses the commercial, North versus South or city versus country. To Gissing, place is more than the objective and disconnected list of scientific facts or 'professed treatises'. Unlike the definitive view of place that a mimetic reading implies, Gissing denies the value of learning 'about places merely as places'. A sense of geography that emphasises the ubiquity of imagined or felt places entirely contradicts the dominant Marxist approach of earlier Gissing criticism. Place in the critical response to Gissing's writing has, thus far, tended to be arrived at obliquely. Its examination forms part of a critical discourse dominated by three related strands: the biographical; the urban-centric; and the chronological, all of which emphasise a prevailing mimesis in their interpretation.