Product Description
Perhaphs no theme dominates the Victorian novel more than that of money; no other Victorian novelist was more preoccupied with this subject than George Gissing (1857-1903).
In the first full-length study of money in the work of this perplexing, compelling writer -- described by George Orwell as "perhaphs the best novelist England has produced" -- Simon J. James examines how Gissing’s work dramatizes the hold of capital on every facet of everyday life, including love, art, virtue and morality. Unsettled Accounts situates Gissing's work within Victorian anxieties over society's transformation by changes in the nature of its economy -- that money's power was both ever-increasing, and a malevolent influence. Gissing's best-known novels, such as The Odd Women and his celebrated novel of literary life New Grub Street, expose the competitive individualism of Victorian society.
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 class, to the making of sexual difference, to the comodification of art, and demonstrates why Gissing's dissident but accurate representations 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 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-siècle literary culture.
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