Book Description
Perhaphs no theme 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 money in the work of this perplexing, compelling writer -- described by George Orwell as "perhaphs the best novelist England has produced" -- Simon J. James examines how Gissing’s work dramatizes the hold of capital on every facet of everyday life, including love, art, virtue and morality. Unsettled Accounts situates Gissing's work within Victorian anxieties over society's transformation by changes in the nature of its economy -- that money's power was both ever-increasing, and a malevolent influence. Gissing's best-known novels, such as The Odd Women and his celebrated novel of literary life New Grub Street, expose the competitive individualism of Victorian society. Unsettled Accounts locates Gissing's novels alongside the place of money in other nineteenth-century writing, in particular the novels of Charles Dickens, a key influence. This study also examines the range of Gissing's preoccupations, from the condition of the working class, to the making of sexual difference, to the comodification of art, and demonstrates why Gissing's dissident but accurate representations of the emergent modernity of late nineteenth-century urban culture deserve a unique place in English literary history. Unsettled Accounts constitutes both a valuable introduction to Gissing’s work and a groundbreaking study of the contexts which shaped the development of his work. This book will be compelling reading not only for anyone interested in Gissing, but also for readers concerned with the economics of the Victorian novel, and with fin-de-siècle literary culture.
About the Author
Simon J. James has taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Salford; he is currently lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Durham. His research interests lie mainly in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction. His work includes critical writings on George Gissing, HG Wells and Charles Dickens; he has also written on masculinity and on contemporary fiction.
Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing FROM THE PUBLISHER
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-siﾽcle Victorian literature.
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