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This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.
This comprehensive study of George Gissing's short stories and related non-fiction is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century realism. For the first time readers will be able to follow the development which transformed Gissing's unremarkable early stories into the very individual tales that elevated his work to the vanguard of realistic short fiction. Gissing's American period is notable for its accumulation of themes that were repeatedly refined and adapted for his later work, causality emerging as the dominant voice. On his return to England, shifting political and philosophical beliefs expressed in his non-fiction had a vital impact on his second phase of short fiction, and t...
This is the first study of the literary theories of H. G. Wells, the founding father of English science fiction and once the most widely read writer in the world. It explores his entire career, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, and prophecy, as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction.
The crown upon the continuing vitality and popularity of Gissing studies in the final decade of the twentieth century was the publication of The Collected Letters of George Gissing (1990-97). The editors of that mammoth undertaking, Paul Mattheisen, Arthur Young and Pierre Coustillas, had long been an inspiration to the younger generation of Gissing scholars, and their presence at the International George Gissing Conference at Amsterdam in September 1999 explained the success of the encounter between Gissing's older and younger critics. Ever since the reappraisal of Gissing's works began to get under way in the early 1960s through the publication of many new editions of the works and ground-...
"The essays in this stimulating collection attest to the scope and variety of Russia's influence on British culture. They move from the early nineteenth century -- when Byron sent his hero Don Juan to meet Catherine the Great, and an English critic sought to come to terms with the challenge of Pushkin -- to a series of Russian-themed exhibitions at venues including the Crystal Palace and Earls Court. The collection looks at British encounters with Russian music, the absorption with Dostoevskii and Chekhov, and finishes by shedding light on Britain's engagement with Soviet film."--Back cover.
Approaching its subject both contextually and comparatively, George Gissing and the Woman Question reads Gissing's novels, short stories and personal writings as a crux in European fiction's formulations of gender and sexuality. The collection places Gissing alongside nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors as diverse as Paul Bourget, Ella Hepworth Dixon, May Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, theorizing the ways in which late-Victorian sexual difference is challenged, explored and performed in Gissing's work. In addition to analyzing the major novels, essays make a case for Gissing as a significant short story writer and address Gissing's own life and afterlife in ways that avoid biographical mimetics. The contributors also place Gissing's work in relation to discourses of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, identity, public space, class and labour, especially literary production. Increasingly viewed as a key chronicler of the late Victorian period's various redefinitions of sexual difference, Gissing is here recognized as a sincere, uncompromising chronicler of social change.
This volume gathers together papers presented at the conference “Ecocriticism in the Nordic Countries; Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” held in Västerås, Sweden, in 2017, organized by the research group Ecocritical Forum at Mälardalen University. The conference, which was an attempt to survey local ecocritical activities, transcended Nordic boundaries, engaging scholars from Europe and the United States. This expansion from the local to the global mirrors the subject of the conference: ecocriticism, a cross-disciplinary field of research in the intersection of environmental issues and cultural expressions. The chapters here engage with topical issues such as the Anthropocene, sustainability in education, and civilizational critique, as well as schools of thought such as materialism, dark ecology and animal studies. The contributions discuss several types of cultural expressions, including film and other visual media, university course design and Nordic, and English language novels and poetry. This volume will attract the interest of readers from a number of different backgrounds, both in the Nordic countries and internationally.
In 1896, author Arthur Morrison gained notoriety for his bleak and violent A Child of the Jago, a slum novel that captured the desperate struggle to survive among London’s poorest. When a reviewer accused Morrison of exaggerating the depravity of the neighborhood on which the Jago was based, he incited the era’s most contentious public debate about the purpose of realism and the responsibilities of the novelist. In his self-defense and in his wider body of work, Morrison demonstrated not only his investments as a formal artist, but also his awareness of social questions. As the first critical essay collection on Arthur Morrison and the East End, this book assesses Morrison’s contributi...
George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact of ‘odd’ or ‘redundant’ women, the cultural impact of ‘the new woman,’ and the opportunities for and conditions of employment in the expanding service sector of the economy. At the heart of these issues as many late Victorians saw them was a problem of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women in the population. There were more females than males, which meant that more and more women would be left unmarried; they would be ‘odd’ or ‘redundant,’ and would be forced to be independent and to find work to...
Is the novel a category of knowledge that merits serious study? Even if the novel has shed the stigma of being mindless entertainment, one might easily assume that reading a novel is not "studying," unless one reads closely and carefully, preferably from a scholarly edition or for a scholarly purpose. Novel Pedagogy explores how Victorian writers envisioned the novel's potential to become knowledge long before the form’s ascendence into the ivory tower. Liwen Zhang argues that Victorian novelists' constant critique of schooling, on the one hand, and their frequent invocation of deep knowledge, on the other, are not self-contradictory. Instead of offering a blissful escape from education, writers such as William Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and George Gissing seek to offer uniquely novelistic pathways to knowledge. Novel Pedagogy offers a new model of novelistic epistemology by showing how the novel, unlike other educational genres, reflects on the unpleasant realities of learning—and of not learning—amid the ubiquity of ineffective textbooks, reluctant students, and false motivations.