The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I


Book Description

This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing chronologically and in close detail. Part I covers Gissing’s early life up until his establishment as a writer of moderate critical success.




The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part II


Book Description

This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing both chronologically and in close detail. Part II assesses the period of Gissing’s greatest authorial triumphs. His most critically acclaimed works, The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893) date from this time.




The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III


Book Description

This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing both chronologically and in close detail. This final volume in Coustillas’s prodigious biography examines the turbulent last years of the author’s life and his literary afterlife.







George Gissing and the Place of Realism


Book Description

This collection explores Gissing’s place in the narrative of fin-de-siècle literature. Together, chapters here theorise how late-Victorian spatial and generic norms are confronted, explored and performed in Gissing’s works. In addition to presenting new readings of the major novels and introducing readers to lesser-known works, the collection advocates Gissing’s importance as a journalist, short story, and travel writer. It also recognises Gissing as a central proponent in the late-Victorian realism debate. The book, like today’s nineteenth-century studies, is interdisciplinary. It includes familiar interpretive approaches—biographical, historicist, and comparative—together with fresh perspectives informed by ecocriticism, materiality, and cultural performance. In addition, it is markedly comparative in scope. Gissing is read alongside familiar authors like Dickens, Ruskin, and Hardy, but also, and more unusually, Nietzsche, Besant, Freud and Foucault. Collectively, these chapters illustrate that Gissing, though attentive to contemporary issues, is neither uncomplicatedly realist nor are his writings uncomplicated historical records of place.




New Grub Street


Book Description




The Literary Review


Book Description




The Heroic Life of George Gissing


Book Description

This ambitious three-volume biography on Gissing examines both his life and writing chronologically and in close detail. Part I covers Gissing's early life up until his establishment as a writer of moderate critical success.




The Whirlpool


Book Description




The Odd Women


Book Description

The Odd Women is a Victorian novel which deals with themes such as the role of women in society, marriage, morals and the early feminist movement. There was the notion in Victorian England that there was an excess of one million women over men. This meant there were "odd" women left over at the end of the equation when the other men and women had paired off in marriage. A cross-section of women dealing with this problem are described in "The Odd Women" and it can be inferred that their lifestyles also set them apart as odd in the sense of strange.