Economics - General & Miscellaneous, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 19th Century - Literary Criticism, Business & Economics in Literature

Unsettled Accounts

Name: Unsettled Accounts
Author: Simon J. James
ISBN: 9781843311072

by Simon J. James

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Overview

"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 classes, to the making of sexual difference to the commodification of art, and demonstrates why Gissing's dissident but accurate respresentations 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 new 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-siecle literary culture.

Synopsis

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 its commodification.

About the Author, Simon J. James

Dr Simon J James is Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. He is the author of essays in the collections A Garland for Gissing (Rodopi, 2001) and George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed (Ashgate, 2005) and of articles on H G Wells and Charles Dickens. He has also edited Volume 2 of The Collected Works of George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study and four H G Wells novels in Penguin Classics. His research interests include Victorian fiction, masculinity in literature and contemporary writing.