New Grub Street by George Gissing
New Grub Street (1891), generally regarded as Gissing's finest novel, is the story of the daily lives and broken dreams of men and women forced to earn a living by the pen. With vivid realism it tells of a group of novelists, journalists, and scholars caught in the literary and cultural crisis that hit Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century, as universal education, popular journalism, and mass communication began to leave their mark on the life of intellectuals. Projecting a strong sense of the London in which his characters struggle, Gissing also illuminates 'the valley of the shadow of books', where the spirit of alienation that created modernism was already stirring.
Gissing, George: - George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist, noted for the unflinching realism of his novels about the lower middle class. Gissing was educated at Owens College, Manchester, where his academic career was brilliant until he was expelled (and briefly imprisoned) for theft. The life of near poverty and constant drudgery-writing and teaching-that he led until the mid-1880s is described in the novels New Grub Street (1891) and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). Before he was 21 he conceived the ambition of writing a long series of novels, somewhat in the manner of Balzac, whom he admired. The first of these, Workers in the Dawn, appeared in 1880, to be followed by 21 others. Between 1886 and 1895 he published one or more novels every year. He also wrote Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), a perceptive piece of literary criticism. His work is serious-though not without a good deal of comic observation-and scrupulously honest. On the social position and psychology of women he is particularly acute: The Odd Women (1893) is a powerful study of female frustration. Gissing was deeply critical, in an almost wholly negative way, of contemporary society.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780192836588 |
| ISBN 10 | 0192836587 |
| Title | New Grub Street |
| Author | George Gissing |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year published | 1999-02-01 |
| Number of pages | 576 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |