DOCSLIB.ORG

Information to Users

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Information to Users INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the tœrt directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type o f computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Infonnation Company 300 NorthZeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 TECHNOLOGIES OF CULTURE; SELF-HELP AND MASCULINITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor o f Philosophy in the Graduate School o f the Ohio State University By Jean Ann Gregorek, M.A. The Ohio State University 1998 Dissertation Committee: Professor David G: Riede, Advisor Approved by: Professor Audrey Jaffe, Advisor Professor Marlene Longenecker Advisors, English Graduate Program UMI Number: 9911198 UMI Microform 9911198 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48103 ABSTRACT In this dissertation I explore the cultural program of "self-help" in nineteenth- century novels and essays in order to elaborate the ways in which the ideal of self­ culture became an internal process of character-building which was applied first to working-class males and then to Victorian society as a whole. My premise is that the influential Amoldian articulation of culture (the foundation of institutionalized literary study) gradually came to be established through the social technology of Self-help, a technology which emerged in popular conduct manuals claiming to transcend class barriers. The chapters entitled "Technologies of Culture" (Parts One and Two), combine readings of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax. Gentleman. Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and the "self-help" sermons of Charles Kingsley, working through the lens of Foucault's Discipline and Punish and his essays on govemmentality in order to demonstrate that Victorian Self-help produced a further refinement of Foucaultian disciplinary techniques. I argue that Self-help and its various incarnations in the mid-Victorian period adapted elements of the eighteenth-century cult of domesticity to forge a new, specifically masculine character-ideal which promised individual cultural capital. Chapter Four, "Narratives of Improvement," considers Dickens's Bleak House and Great Expectations alongside popular magazine fiction as illustrations of masculine agency derived through aesthetic self-development. This section highlights the numerous complications which arose in writing the lives of the social climbers who subscribed to Smiles's philosophy of success—the narrative disjunctions and displacements necessary to uncover the secret that beneath a ragged exterior beats the heart of a "true" gentleman; the parallels between delinquency and excessive ambition; the intertwining of self-narratives with narratives of criminality. ii The final section, "Narratives of Ressentiment." focuses on the anxieties about masculinity which were triggered in the gradual process of the internalization of bourgeois culture and the increasing opposition of a masculine high cultural norm to a supposedly corrupt and effeminate bourgeois sphere Here I examine works which explicitly rehearse, but also counter, the Smilesian Self-help paradigm—novels which offer an aesthetic education as the road to improvement but inevitably prove that such a solution is doomed to fail, foundering on the lack of adequate "masculine" attributes on the part of enfeebled protagonists and on the inherent contradictions in late- Victorian views of culture itself. Of particular interest in this vein are such proto- modemist texts as George Gissing's Bom in Exile and The Odd Women. Fredric Jameson's characterization of Gissing as the quintessential novelist of Nietzschean ressentiment is called upon, and I further propose that The Genealogv of Morals constitutes another influential version of late-Victorian self-help, reading Gissing and Nietzsche together as examples of the fin de siecle male sentimental and, as a result, suggesting important revisions to the standard trajectory of literary modernism. In its attention to gender, as well as in its attempt to situate the development of what Ian Hunter terms the "ethical work ethic" of Self-help in relation to nineteenth-century class conflict, my project differs from Chris Baldick's Gramscian account of the rise of literary study and from the genealogy recently put forward by Hunter. Retuming "culture" to the political context of the nineteenth century ultimately leads me to argue that the institutional legacy it has left for contemporary literary and cultural studies remains contaminated by the masculinist tendencies which came to be crystallized in much British high modemism. Ill ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has been a very long time in the making and many people have offered me invaluable assistance and encouragement along the way. First and foremost I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to my wonderfully supportive committee: David G. Riede, Audrey Jaffe, and Marlene Longenecker. There is no way I can ever thank any of you enough—but I really don't think you could have done more. I also need to thank my family, Gerald Gregorek, Rita Gregorek, and my sister, Susan Gregorek, for the many years of inspiration they have provided and for the abundant patience they have continually displayed, and for rescuing me more times than I can count. I would like to note my gratitude towards those besides my dissertation committee members who have taken the time to read and comment on various drafts of this project: Cathy Shuman, Francesca Sawaya, Jacki Spangler, John Heins, Susan Ritchie, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Beth Ina, and Bruce Robbins. And there are many friends, colleagues and teachers with whom I have argued, consulted and conferred; people who have explained new perspectives, who have sustained me intellectually, and who have generally helped me to keep body and soul together. In no particular order, I would like to acknowledge David Howard, Judith Mayne, Anita Pacheco, Christina Moore, Joel Woller, Kendra Hovey, Jacki Spangler, Loren Lazarony, Bruce iv Robbins, Susan Ritchie, Donna De George, Pejmaan Fallah, Reza Reyazi, Yoshia Fumhashi, Tammy Birk, Ken Petri, Wendy Somerson, Karen Woodrum, Grace Ellis, Jack Gruenhagen, Margie Prince, John Heins, Jay Slawney, Margrit Froelich, Josh Piker, Cathy TufarieMo, Mark Wyatt, Kelly Knuth, Chris Love, Kerry Vachta, Elaine Comegys, Dismas Masolo, Shannon Cates, Ruth Hoff, Kurt Miyazaki, Marianne Whelchel, Eric Horsting, Chris Hill, David Duff, Gary Famell, and Clare McGregor. And thanks to all the graduate students in Marlene Longenecker's Dissertation Reading Group: Beth Ina, Julia Keller, Andy Evans, Ken MacNeil, Elizabeth Patnoe, Karin Jacobson, and Paul Eisenstein. Much credit for the completion of this project goes to the tireless librarians at the Olive Kettering Library at Antioch College: Joe Cali, Steven Duffy, Janet Hulm, April Spisak, Jan Miller, and especially Patrick Cates for their generosity with their time and their invariably professional assistance. I must also mention my sincere appreciation of the many amazing students at Antioch College who make learning and teaching such a pleasure. Finally, an extra special thanks to Francesca Sawaya for seeing me through this from start to finish, for reading innumerable drafts, for never tiring of hearing me complain—I could not have done this without you. VITA April 2, 1960......................................................Bom, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. 1988......................................................................M.A., English, The University of York, York, England 1988-1994........................................................... Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University Department of English, Columbus, Ohio 1994-present....................................................... Assistant Professor of Literature, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio PUBLICATIONS Jean Gregorek. "Horror is What A Girl Might Feel"; Narrative Erotics in Depression-Era Pulp Fiction." Imagine That: Essavs on Imaees of Women in the Media. Ann C. Hall, editor. Greenwood Press, forthcoming Fall 1998. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English VI TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract li
Load more

Recommended publications
  • NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES ISSUE 4.1 (SPRING 2008) George Gissing's Manifesto: the Odd Women and the Unclassed
    NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES # ISSUE 4.1 (SPRING 2008) George Gissing's Manifesto: The Odd Women and The Unclassed By Lawton A. Brewer, Georgia State University <1>Jacob Korg, in George Gissing: A Critical Biography, contends that, although the economic circumstances of the Madden sisters, focal characters of The Odd Women, constitute severe challenges to their survival, “[…] Gissing perceives that the most desperate element of their plight is the loneliness and barrenness of lives in which an invitation to tea or a slice of roast beef are events of supreme importance” (188). The sisters long for activities appropriate to their claim to membership in the genteel middle class. Nonetheless, it is the Madden’s poverty that accounts for the social sterility Korg so correctly identifies. Their desire to eat competes with their desire for class inclusion. Consequently, although the book focuses on issues such as marriage, friendship, and kinship, these affiliations are brokered in an economic system in which everything has, quite literally, a price. George Gissing’s The Odd Women, a novel so often seen in terms of its feministic depiction of the “woman problem,”(1) reduces virtually every human relationship to the level of an economic transaction of some sort. Certainly, Gissing does not render every relationship in exclusively economic terms, nor does he stipulate that women or men are economic entities and nothing else. However, the deprived condition endured by the characters regulates many of the decisions, conversations, and commentary in the novel, resulting in discussions which often suggest, explicitly or implicitly, a business deal of some kind.
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Journal
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING JOURNAL “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ***************************** Volume XXXII, Number 2 April, 1996 ****************************** Contents A Distinguished Acquaintance of Gissing’s at Ciboure: Arthur Brownlow Fforde, by Pierre Coustillas 1 Between Emancipation and Restraint – Reading the Body in The Odd Women, by Mihoko Takeda 10 Shan F. Bullock: Gissing’s Admirer and an Ingenious Short Story Writer, by Masahiko Yahata 14 A Forgotten Assessment of Veranilda, by Randolph Faries, 2d 19 Gissing in the Boston Evening Transcript: His Interview by Joseph Anderson, by Pierre Coustillas 23 Book Review, by John Sloan 29 Notes and News 32 Recent Publications 34 Springtime in Northumberland, by Algernon Gissing 36 -- 1 -- A Distinguished Acquaintance of Gissing’s at Ciboure Arthur Brownlow Fforde Pierre Coustillas Until recently little enough was known of Gissing’s stay at Ciboure, the small fishing harbour adjoining Saint-Jean-de-Luz, from July 1902 to June 1903. He now kept his diary very irregularly and wrote down but few details about his social life. Correspondence with his relatives and friends was becoming infrequent; having to make a living by his pen, he concentrated on work as much as his health allowed. More numerous than those to any other correspondent at this time, his letters to his literary agent, James B. Pinker, are a faithful mirror of his professional activities, but of his non-literary occupations he said little to anyone. Rarely did he suggest that the trio he formed with Gabrielle Fleury and “Maman” enjoyed a pleasant and varied social life, that of the English colony.
    [Show full text]
  • The Gissing Newsletter
    THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume III, Number 2 June, 1967 ********************************** -- 1 -- Denzil Quarrier and the Woman Question James Haydock Wisconsin State University The importance of the woman question in Gissing’s work is undisputed. Scholars generally agree that Gissing had much to say about the subject in The Emancipated, The Odd Women, In the Year of the Jubilee, and The Whirlpool. Yet one other novel – of paramount importance in this connection – seems to have been overlooked. That novel is Denzil Quarrier (1892). It has more on the woman question than any of Gissing’s previous novels, and it presents for the first time an utterance that later becomes the informing idea of The Odd Women (1893). Denzil Quarrier’s address to the Polterham voters, entitled “Woman: Her Place in Modern Life,” is that part of the novel where Gissing’s views are most accurately reflected. In the town of Polterham even a passing mention of the woman question is enough to bring heated discussion. When the townsmen hear that Quarrier is the radical candidate for membership in Parliament, one of them asks “whether Mr. Quarrier is disposed to support the Female Suffrage movement.” Another retorts that if such be the case, “he mustn’t expect my vote and interest. We’ve seen enough in Polterham lately of the Female question” (first edition, ch. IV, p. 47). Then, commenting as author, Gissing adds: “The Woman question was rather a dangerous one in Polterham just now; that period of Revivalism (in which the women made fools of themselves), and the subsequent campaign of Mrs.
    [Show full text]
  • Place and Class in George Gissing' S "Slum" Novels, Part I, by Pat Colling 3
    Contents Knowing Your Place: Place and Class in George Gissing' s "Slum" Novels, Part I, by Pat Colling 3 Gissing Reviewed on Amazon, by Robin Friedman 19 Notes and News 42 Recent Publications 43 ISSN 017-0615 The Gissing Journal Volume 50, Number 1,January 2014 "More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me." Commonplace Book Knowing Your Place: Place and Class in George Gissing's "Slum" Novels, Part 1 PAT COLLING The Gissing Trust Between 1880 and 1889 five of Gissing' s seven novels­ Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889)--were set in deprived neighbourhoods. All were concerned with life in penury, and had major characters who were working class. Contemporarynovelists and readers tended to see the poor as a cause; by the time Thyrza was published in 1887 George Gissing did not. By then he was not romanticising the working classes, nor presenting them as victims, nor necessarily as unhappy, and in this he can seem, to the reader expecting the established Victorian norm of philanthropic compassion, uncaring, even contemptuous. But his distinct representation of the poor-good, bad, and average-as they are, in the same way that novelists were already presenting the middle and upper classes, is respectfulrather than jaundiced. He sees them as individuals with differing characteristics, values, abilities, and aspirations, not as a lumpenproletariat in need of rescue and redemption. Gissing goes further than other novelists in 3 being willing to criticise the inhabitants as well as the slums, and he differs from them in his frequent presentation of the family as a scene of conflict rather than as the more familiar Victorian ideal of refuge.
    [Show full text]
  • George Gissing and the Place of Realism
    George Gissing and the Place of Realism George Gissing and the Place of Realism Edited by Rebecca Hutcheon George Gissing and the Place of Realism Edited by Rebecca Hutcheon This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Hutcheon and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6998-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6998-0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Rebecca Hutcheon Chapter 1 .................................................................................................. 14 George Gissing, Geographer? Richard Dennis Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 36 Workers in the Dawn, Slum Writing and London’s “Urban Majority” Districts Jason Finch Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 55 Four Lady Cyclists José Maria Diaz Lage Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 70 Gissing’s Literary
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Journal
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING JOURNAL “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ***************************** Volume XXXIII, Number 4 October, 1997 ****************************** Contents The Forthcoming Gissing Conference: First Announcement 1 George Gissing, Henry James and the Concept of Realism, 2 by Janice Deledalle-Rhodes Gissing and the Paparazzi, by Francesco Badolato and 29 Pierre Coustillas “Far, Far Away”: George Gissing’s Passion for the Classics, 35 by Ayaka Okada Book Review, by William Greenslade 37 Notes and News 43 Recent Publications 47 -- 1 -- First Announcement Gissing Conference 9-11 September 1999 English Department, University of Amsterdam Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam The Netherlands Preparations are under way for an international Gissing Conference to be held at Amsterdam in the late summer of 1999. The organizers have gratefully accepted the offer made by the English Department in the University of Amsterdam to host this first major conference to focus on the works of the novelist, whose reappraisal has been intensified by and has greatly benefited from the recently completed publication of his collected correspondence. The conference will be held at the newly restored Doelenzaal, a splendid example of seventeenth-century Dutch architecture, in the heart of the old city. Within walking distance are some of the world’s greatest art collections, housed in the Rijksmuseum, the Municipal museum and the Van Gogh museum. The members of the organizing Committee are: Prof. Martha S. Vogeler (USA), Prof. Jacob Korg (USA), Prof. Pierre Coustillas (France), Dr. David Grylls (England) and Drs.
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Journal
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING JOURNAL “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ***************************** Volume XXXIV, Number 1 January, 1998 ****************************** Contents More of Gissing’s “Indispensable” False Starts and Discarded Novels, 1 by Marilyn B. Saveson The Hope of Pessimism and the Will to Live in “The Unclassed,” 8 by Markus Neacey Walter Gissing: A Further Note, by William Greenslade 17 More about Gissing and the Paparazzi, by Francesco Badolato 19 and Pierre Coustillas Book Reviews, by Fumio Hojoh, Janice Deledalle-Rhodes, 22 Wulfhard Stahl, and Bouwe Postmus Notes and News 34 Recent Publications 36 -- 1 -- More of Gissing’s “Indispensable” False Starts and Discarded Novels Marilyn B. Saveson Otterbein College, Westerville, Ohio “Again & again & yet again I have begun a novel; only to write a few chapters & throw them aside as useless,” wrote George Gissing on 2 December 1892. “Many, many months have I thus wasted.” Readers of his diary and of his letters will recognize this characteristic frame of mind in Gissing. It has been known for some time that he made at least 35 false starts of novels, and that an additional 4 were actually completed before being abandoned or lost. These 39 lost works are identified and described in my article “Gissing’s ‘Indispensable’ False Starts: an Annotated Checklist of his Discarded Novels” in the January 1990 issue of the Gissing Newsletter, pp. 2-17. The key word in the title is “indispensable.” As he explained to his brother Algernon on 29 May 1884, after complaining about wasted time and paper, “Not waste, however; it is indispensable.” He did not mean that the discarded material was useful in future works, although it sometimes was.
    [Show full text]
  • Gissing's New Grub Street and the Wider Concerns of Impoverishment
    Gissing’s New Grub Street and the Wider Concerns of Impoverishment MCPHERSON, Sue Available from Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/13174/ This document is the author deposited version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Published version MCPHERSON, Sue (2017). Gissing’s New Grub Street and the Wider Concerns of Impoverishment. English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 60 (4), 490-505. Copyright and re-use policy See http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive http://shura.shu.ac.uk 1 Sue McPherson, Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Gissing’s New Grub Street and the Wider Concerns of Impoverishment Trying to survive on an irregular income, Harold Biffen, educated and impoverished author, pawns his belongings four times in the course of New Grub Street. Edwin Reardon, writer and self-declared part of a class of “casual wage-earners,” sells books and furniture to second-hand dealers to supplement his earnings.1 Major and minor characters often feel the pang of hunger: Reardon spends time in “semi-starvation,” Biffen is described as a man of “excessive meagreness [that] would all but have qualified him to enter an exhibition in the capacity of living skeleton,” a “hunger-bitten clerk” is seen scribbling job applications, and an unemployed surgeon, Victor, begs for coffee and food at Camden Town Railway Station.2 Much attention has been paid to how New Grub Street represents the failures and successes of late-Victorian
    [Show full text]
  • The Unclassed Online
    QfAUD [Library ebook] The Unclassed Online [QfAUD.ebook] The Unclassed Pdf Free George Gissing ePub | *DOC | audiobook | ebooks | Download PDF Download Now Free Download Here Download eBook 2016-01-28Original language:English 9.00 x .55 x 6.00l, #File Name: 1523705477240 pages | File size: 75.Mb George Gissing : The Unclassed before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised The Unclassed: 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. A Rare Late Victorian NovelBy Robin FriedmanAlthough little- known today, George Gissing's (1856 - 1903) second published novel "The Unclassed" deserves to be read and remembered. The book was written in 1884 and published as a three-decker novel for which Gissing received the paltry sum of 30 pounds. In 1895, when he had received some recognition as a novelist, Gissing edited "The Unclassed" by cutting about one-third of the initial text and writing a short Preface. Although it seems to me the weaker of the two versions, the second edition of "The Unclassed" is virtually always used when the book is reissued.The novel was an ambitious effort for a young struggling writer of 26, with broad themes of love, friendship, social alienation, and urban life. It includes powerful scenes of the slums of Victorian London and a treatment of prostitution which, for its day, was frank and explicit. Much of the novel is autobiographically based, but the reader new to Gissing would be well advised to approach it simply on its own ground. The two primary male characters in the book Osmond Waymark and Julian Casti are young, bookish and aspiring writers.
    [Show full text]
  • Read PDF ^ Will Warburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback
    IOOOFIEUEAGD > eBook » Will Warburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback) W ill W arburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback) Filesize: 8.5 MB Reviews This publication is indeed gripping and intriguing. It is actually writter in basic terms and not difficult to understand. I am just pleased to explain how here is the greatest publication we have read through during my own lifestyle and could be he best pdf for at any time. (Ervin Crona) DISCLAIMER | DMCA WYE3NB0LBWAH < Doc » Will Warburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback) WILL WARBURTON (DODO PRESS) (PAPERBACK) To save Will Warburton (Dodo Press) (Paperback) PDF, remember to refer to the hyperlink beneath and save the document or have access to additional information which might be relevant to WILL WARBURTON (DODO PRESS) (PAPERBACK) book. Dodo Press, United Kingdom, 2007. Paperback. Condition: New. Language: English . Brand New Book ***** Print on Demand *****.George Gissing was an English novelist, who wrote twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. Although his early works are naturalistic, he developed into one of the the most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, to lower-middle class parents, Gissing went on to win a scholarship to Owens College, the present day University of Manchester. A brilliant student, he excelled at university, winning many coveted prizes, including the Shakespeare prize in 1875. Between 1891 and 1897 (his so-called middle period) he produced his best works, which include New Grub Street, Born in Exile, The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee, and The Whirlpool. The middle years of the decade saw his reputation reach new heights: by some critics he is counted alongside George Meredith and Thomas Hardy as one of the best three novelists of his day.
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume XIX, Number 3 July, 1983 ********************************** -- 1 -- Gissing out of Context : Denzil Quarrier Brian Robert Walker Wymondham College, Norfolk [This is the first of a series of articles reproduced from an unpublished M.A. thesis which Brian Walker summed up as follows on p. IV of his bound typescript: In this thesis I question the traditional focus of attention on Gissing’s work which seems to be primarily concerned with the social and historical aspects of his novels and with the personality of the author himself. ************************************************* Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington, Seattle Editorial Correspondence should be sent to the Editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59110-La Madeleine, France, and all other correspondence to C. C. KOHLER, 12, Horshani Road, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 2JL, England. Subscriptions: Private Subscribers: £3.00 per annum Libraries: £5.00 per annum ************************************************* -- 2 -- I attempt to consider the novels as works of art, as products of the imagination, as transfigurations and transmutations of reality, and to assess their value as expressing wider truths about the human condition. I examine Gissing’s treatment of character and his analysis of motivation and the springs of action and focus attention, particularly on his employment of irony as a reducing though positive technique. I conclude that each novel, whilst it is centred on a particular contemporary development or phenomenon, such as the cult of Aestheticism or the question of female emancipation, is concerned to stress that a complete allegiance to an ideology or social theory is damaging to full personal development.
    [Show full text]
  • Issn 0017-0615 the Gissing Newsletter
    ISSN 0017-0615 THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book ********************************** Volume XVIII, Number 1 January, 1982 ********************************** Who are all these good-looking and happy people? The best-dressed group of 1981? No, they are participants at the Gissing Symposium held at Wakefield last September. STANDING (left to right): John Halperin, Gillian Tindall, John Goodchild, Peter Keating, C. J. Francis, Frank Woodman, Mr. Bird, Jacob Korg, Malcolm Allen, Pierre Coustillas, Michel Ballard, Ros Stinton, David Dowling, David Grylls, Patrick Parrinder, Douglas Hallam, Kate Taylor, Terry Wright, Francesco Badolato, John Harrison, Rick Allen, Clifford Brook. SITTING (left to right): Anne Peel, Elizabeth Foster, Cynthia Korg, Chris Kohler, Kelsey Thornton, Tricia Grylls, Maria Chialant, Mabel Ferrett, M. Clarke, P. Clarke. -- 2 -- The National Weekly: A Lost Source of Unknown Gissing Fiction Robert L. Se1ig Purdue University Calumet Undiscovered Gissing fiction most certainly awaits whoever can find an 1877 file of the National Weekly. This highly ephemeral Chicago publication at times carried the alternate titles of Carl Pretzel’s Weekly or Carl Pretzel’s Illustrated Weekly. The only library known to possess any holdings of it, the library of the Chicago Historical Society, has one issue apiece from 1875, 1876, 1878, and 1880 but none from the year when Gissing lived in that Midwestern American city. His only extant story from the National Weekly – “A Terrible Mistake” (5 May 1877, p. 10) – survives in a page of the paper kept by Gissing himself. In Notes and Queries of October 7, 1933, the bookseller M.
    [Show full text]