Book Description
Arguably, no topic dominates the Victorian novel more than that of money; no other Victorian novelist was more preoccupied with this subject than George Gissing (1857-1903). In the first full-length study of this perplexing but compelling novelist, James examines how Gissing's work reveals an unhappy accommodation with money's underwriting of human existence and culture, and how daily life in all its forms -- moral, intellectual, familial and erotic -- is transcended or made irrelevant by the commodification of everyday life. Novels such as "New Grub Street" expose high culture's dependence on the ruthless Darwinism of late Victorian capitalism: literary and personal success can only be achieved by understanding and adapting to the immanent and irresistible nature of a market hostile to the development of human self-betterment. Situated against nineteenth-century analyses of monetary relations by thinkers such as Ruskin, Mill, Marx and Carlyle, and novels by Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, "Unsettled Accounts" demonstrates how Gissing's work is engagedly modern, dealing as it does with changes in the nature of the literary market, advertising, imperialism, the New Woman, and the condition of the working classes. This groundbreaking new study, published in the centenary of Gissing's death, will be of considerable interest to undergraduates, researchers and scholars. A valuable introduction to Gissing's work, it claims a prominent place for him in fin-de-siècle Victorian literature.

FROM THE PUBLISHER