Introduction

Abstract

The view expressed by P. J. Keating over a decade ago — that ‘few writers of comparable stature can have been rediscovered so often to so little effect as Gissing’¹ — would no longer seem to be true. The revival of interest among scholars and critics has laid the basis of a convincing alternative to the traditional view of Gissing as a fascinating failure. A compelling aspect of this general process of rediscovery has been the recognition not only of the centrality of Gissing’s novels, but of the challenging nature of their realisation and effect. Yet although the particularity of Gissing’s work is now less likely to be conceived in narrowly personal terms, his place continues to be that of a literary curiosity who stands between two major periods of literary art. The characterisation of Gissing’s minor status in terms of the transitional nature of his work partly reflects the response of present-day criticism in general to the indigenous English novel of the fin de siècle, and specifically to what is generally seen as the decline of the English realist tradition into the naturalism of Gissing, Wells and Bennett. It will be the purpose of this introduction to examine, in an inevitably schematic form, Gissing’s place in the intellectual, cultural and literary framework of the late-Victorian period. The intention, however, is not to promote the claims of Gissing’s centrality or place in that large-scale aesthetic disruption which can be seen to transform the spirit and tenor of English literature from the late 1850s on.

I fail as yet to make out why exactly it is that going so far he so sturdily refuses to go further.

Henry James