George Gissing and the Woman Question

Contents: Introduction: George Gissing and the woman question, Simon J. James and Christine Huguet; Part I Gissing’s Complex Discourse of (New) Womanhood: Gissing and prostitution, David Grylls; Gissing and women in the 1890s: the conditions and consequences of narrative sympathy, Constance D. Harsh; Gissing’s failed new men: masculinity in The Odd Women, Tara MacDonald; Gissing’s Nell: her body and his text, Roger Milbrandt; At high pressure? The spinster and the costs of independence in Gissing’s short stories, 1894-1903, Emma Liggins; Domesticity and discipline in Gissing’s short fiction, Rosemary Jann; It’s ’ard on a feller: female violence and the culture of refinement in Gissing’s The Nether World, Anthony Patterson. Part II Gissing’s Voice: A Comparatist Assessment: ’What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists?’: the metaliterary ghost in The Odd Women, Cristina Ceron; Rewriting the addict: Gissings’s challenge to fin-de-siècle representations of the female alcoholic in The Nether World, Debbie Harrison; Knowing shopgirls: Monica Madden and Gissing’s refusal, Adrienne Munich; Women of letters: from New Grub Street to The Story of a Modern Woman, Maria Teresa Chialant; The solipsistic heroine in 1897: George Gissing’s The Whirlpool and May Sinclair’s Audrey Craven, Diana Maltz; ’Intriguing plebians’ and hypergamous desire: Paul Bourget’s Le Disciple and Born in Exile, M.D. Allen; Bibliography; Index.