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Author: Emma Liggins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351933981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
George Gissing's work reflects his observations of fin-de-siècle London life. Influenced by the French naturalist school, his realist representations of urban culture testify to the significance of the city for the development of new class and gender identities, particularly for women. Liggins's study, which considers standard texts such as The Odd Women, New Grub Street, and The Nether World as well as lesser known short works, examines Gissing's fiction in relation to the formation of these new identities, focusing specifically on debates about the working woman. From the 1880s onward, a new genre of urban fiction increasingly focused on work as a key aspect of the modern woman's identity, elements of which were developed in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s. Showing his fascination with the working woman and her narrative potential, Gissing portrays women from a wide variety of occupations, ranging from factory girls, actresses, prostitutes, and shop girls to writers, teachers, clerks, and musicians. Liggins argues that by placing the working woman at the center of his narratives, rather than at the margins, Gissing made an important contribution to the development of urban fiction, which increasingly reflected current debates about women's presence in the city.
Author: Emma Liggins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351933981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Get Book Here
Book Description
George Gissing's work reflects his observations of fin-de-siècle London life. Influenced by the French naturalist school, his realist representations of urban culture testify to the significance of the city for the development of new class and gender identities, particularly for women. Liggins's study, which considers standard texts such as The Odd Women, New Grub Street, and The Nether World as well as lesser known short works, examines Gissing's fiction in relation to the formation of these new identities, focusing specifically on debates about the working woman. From the 1880s onward, a new genre of urban fiction increasingly focused on work as a key aspect of the modern woman's identity, elements of which were developed in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s. Showing his fascination with the working woman and her narrative potential, Gissing portrays women from a wide variety of occupations, ranging from factory girls, actresses, prostitutes, and shop girls to writers, teachers, clerks, and musicians. Liggins argues that by placing the working woman at the center of his narratives, rather than at the margins, Gissing made an important contribution to the development of urban fiction, which increasingly reflected current debates about women's presence in the city.
Author: Université de Lille III. Centre d'études victoriennes
Publisher: Presses Univ. Septentrion
ISBN: 9782859390884
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Comme pour l'anglais du XXe siècle finissant, la Ville - qu'il s'agisse de Londres ou des cités industrielles du Nord - était pour les sujets de la reine Victoria à la fois un paradis et un enfer. Peu d'écrivains de l'époque l'ont méconnue; ils ont, selon leur culture, leur sensibilité, leur tempérament, réagi de façons contradictoires à un phénomène d'une ampleur sans précédent, qui a été, et demeure, au centre des débats politiques et sociaux. Les essais contenus dans ce volume reflètent la variété des attitudes victoriennes envers l'urbanisation. Ils évoquent les dures réalités de la misère et de la corruption, les conclusions des enquêtes menées dans un labyrinth où trouvaient place aussi bien la criminalité qu'une culture nouvelle; mais ils montrent aussi la magie de la ville, "douce cité d'illusion, de mythes, d'aspirations et de cauchemars", qui, selon Jonathan Raban, est aussi réelle, sinon plus, que la cité perceptible dans les statistiques et les études des sociologues, des démographes et des architectes. Les principaux auteurs traités sont Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Frederic Harrison, George Gissing, Arthur Morrison et Rudyard Kipling. Les six essais qui leur sont consacrés sont précédés d'un essai plus général écrit par un spécialiste reconnu de la civilisation urbaine britannique. L'ensemble entend apporter un complément original aux études parues sur la question en Angleterre depuis une douzaine d'années. Il reflète l'ambiguïté des jugements humains devant un phénomène tangible, émminemment analysable, dont procèdent de multiples visions subjectives et substantielles.
Author: Michelle Elizabeth Allen
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821417703
Category : Hygiene
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian Londonexplores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove toclean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts.Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitaryimprovement, plunged into London's dark and dirty spaces and returned withthe material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificentprojects of sanitary engineering. Sanitary reform, however, was not alwaysmet with unqualified enthusiasm. While some improvements, such as slumclearances, the development of sewerage, and the embankment of the Thames,may have made London a cleaner place to live, these projects also destroyedand reshaped the built environment, and in doing so, altered the meanings andexperiences of the city. From the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing to anonymous magazinearticles and pamphlets, resistance to reform found expression in the nostalgicappreciation of a threatened urban landscape and anxiety about domestic autonomyin an era of networked sanitary services. Cleansing the City emphasizes the disruptions and disorientation occasioned by purification--a process we are generally inclined to see as positive. By recovering these sometimes oppositional, sometimes ambivalent responses, Michelle Allen elevates a significant undercurrent of Victorian thought into the mainstream and thus provides insight into the contested nature of sanitary modernization.
Author: Raymond Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195198102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.
Author: Philip J. Waller
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780192891631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
By the outbreak of the First World War, England had become the world's first mass urban society. In just over sixty years the proportion of town-dwellers had risen from 50 to 80 percent, and during this period many of the most crucial developments in English urban society had taken place. This book provides a uniquely comprehensive analysis of those developments - conurbations, suburbs, satellite towns, garden cities, and seaside resorts. Waller assesses the importance of London, the provincial cities, and manufacturing centers. He also examines the continuing influence of the small country town and "rural" England on political, economic, and cultural growth. Scholarly and readable, this book is a general social history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England, seen from an urban perspective.
Author: George Gissing
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Author: Simon J. James
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843311089
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Simon J. 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 its commodification.
Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374711682
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 125
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Book Description
A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.
Author: Nicholas Freeman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191527319
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Conceiving the City is an innovative study of the ways in which a generation of late-Victorian novelists, poets, painters, and theoreticians attempted to represent London in literature and art. Breaking away from the language and style of Dickens and the static panorama paintings of William Powell Frith, major figures such as Henry James and J. M. Whistler, and, crucially, less-celebrated authors such as Arthur Machen, Edwin Pugh, and George Egerton bent realism into exciting new shapes. In the naturalism of George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, the fragmentary impressions of Ford Madox Ford, and the brooding mystery of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photogravures, London emerged as a focus for dynamic, explicitly modern art. Although many of these insights would be dismissed or at least downplayed by subsequent generations, the ideas evolved during the period from 1870 to 1914 anticipate not only the work of high modernists such as Eliot and Woolf, but also that of later urban theorists such as Foucault and de Certeau, and the novels and travelogues of contemporary London writers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Nicholas Freeman recovers a sense of late-Victorian London as a subject for dynamic theoretical and aesthetic experiments, and shows, in stimulating analyses of Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Arthur Symons, and others how much of our understanding of urban space we owe to eminent (and not so eminent) Victorian figures. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book restores a much-needed historical perspective to our engagement with the metropolis.
Author: Dave Welsh
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 184631223X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to explore the ways in which the London Underground/ Tube was "mapped" by a number of writers from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf. From late Victorian London to the end of the World War II, "underground writing" created an imaginative world beneath the streets ofLondon. The real subterranean railway was therefore re-enacted in number of ways in writing, including as Dantean Underworld or hell, as gateway to a utopian future, as psychological looking- glass or as place of safety and security. The book is a chronological study from the opening of the first underground in the 1860s to its role in WW2. Each chapter explores perspectives on the underground in a number of writers, starting with George Gissing in the 1880s, moving through the work of H. G. Wells and into the writing of the1920s and 1930s including Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. It concludes with its portrayal in the fiction, poetry and art (including Henry Moore) of WW2. The approach takes a broadly cultural studies perspective, crossing the boundaries of transport history, literature and London/urban studies. It draws mainly on fiction but also uses poetry, art, journals, postcards and posters to illustrate. It links the actual underground trains, tracks andstations to the metaphorical world of "underground writing" and places the writing in a social/political context.
