George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent (The Nineteenth Century Series)

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.

Christine Huguet is a Senior Lecturer at Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3, France. She has edited volumes of essays on Gissing, George Moore and Charles Dickens. Simon J. James is Professor of Victorian Literature at the Department of English Studies, Durham University, UK. He is the author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing.