First published in 2005, this collection of essays brings together British, European and North American literary critics and cultural historians with diverse specialities and interests to demonstrate the range of contemporary perspectives through which George Gissing’s fiction can be viewed. It offers both closely contextualised historical readings and broader cultural and philosophical assessments and engages with a number of themes including: the cultural and social formation of class and gender, social mobility and its unsettling effects on individual and collective identities, the...

Over the first half of the nineteenth century, writers like Austen and Brontë confined their critiques to satirical portrayals of women musicians. Later, however, a marked shift occurred with the introduction of musical female characters where were positively to be feared.

First published in 2000, this book examines the reasons for this shift in representations of female musicians in Victorian fiction from 1860-1900. Focusing on changing gender roles, musical practices and the framing of both of these scientific discourses, the book explores how fictional notions of female...

First published in 1987, this book engages directly with a selection of major texts from the traditional English literature syllabus and applies some of the techniques from the work of theorists such as Macherey, Balibar, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and Deleuze. Focusing on questions of class and gender, on the nature of knowledge and power, on the distinction between the public and the private, display and consciousness, the work traces and celebrates the dispersal of Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Mansfield Park, Vanity Fair and the novels of Charles...

There is no English novelist whose reputation has fluctuated so violently as that of George Meredith. First published in 1971, this volume of essays reassesses the works of George Meredith. Despite his unevenness, the essays demonstrate that Meredith was an important experimental writer and as one of the masters of the English novel.

This book will be of interest to those studying 19^th Century literature.

First published in 1966, this book collects six essays which discuss the experience of social change as it reveals itself in the work of several nineteenth century novelists. In the novels studied, and the discussion of fiction that follows, the authors argue that all these novelists’ attempts to confront social change — to connect old with new, past with present and the attempted inclusiveness of vision in a changing society — sooner or later fail. The essays are polemic in arguing against the contemporary critical consensus that this failure is a limitation of imaginative...

First published in 1975, this study is concerned with the representation of non-European people in English popular fiction in the period from 1858-1920. It examines the developments in thinking about people across the world and shows how they affected writers’ views of evolution, race, heredity and of the life of the so-called ‘primitive’ man.

This book will be of interest to those studying 19^th century literature.

First published in 2005, this collection of essays brings together British, European and North American literary critics and cultural historians with diverse specialities and interests to demonstrate the range of contemporary perspectives through which George Gissing’s fiction can be viewed. It offers both closely contextualised historical readings and broader cultural and philosophical assessments and engages with a number of themes including: the cultural and social formation of class and gender, social mobility and its unsettling effects on individual and collective identities, the...

First published in 1971. The book examines the presentation of the urban and industrial working classes in Victorian fiction. It considers the different types of working men and women who appear in fiction, the environments they are shown to inhabit, and the use of phonetics to indicate the sound of working class voices. Evidence is drawn from a wide range of major and minor fiction, and new light is cast on Dickens, Mrs Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, George Gissing, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Morrison. This book would be of interest to students of literature, sociology and history.

First published in 1989, this study investigates Hardy not so much in terms of his novels but as he has been constituted as a major figure in English literature. Using Hardy as a case-study, it looks at how a ‘great writer’ is produced in sociological terms, analysing the critical, cultural and ideological factors involved. By exposing this construction, the book seeks to release Hardy from the constraints imposed by orthodox literary history.

This book will be of interest to those studying nineteenth-century literature.

First published in 1983. Balzac’s novels are one of the largest and most important sources for the history of post-revolutionary France, but they have scarcely been tapped as they should be. Approaching the subject from the perspective of a literary, the author shows in detail how specific historical circumstances and movement are reflected in the novels, and indicates the consistency and profundity of Balzac’s analysis of contemporary French society. Above all, attention is concentrated on Balzac’s examination of the shift in class relationships resulting from the revolutionary...