Division of Purpose in George Gissing

PMLA ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-336
Author(s):  
Jacob Korg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Novels

Most of George Gissing's social novels bear the mark of an allegiance divided between social reform and art. Each begins by addressing itself to some problem of nineteenth-century civilization, such as poverty, Mammonism, socialism, rack-renting, educational reform, or the position of women, depicting evil conditions with powerful social realism. As the novel proceeds, however, social questions are gradually relegated to the background, and the story becomes a steady and, at best, inevitable unfolding of events whose course is determined in the final analysis by the characters of the people involved in it. There may be frequent reversions to “problems” and these may have some effect on the action, but a dénouement that fails to correspond with the social theme, or even contradicts it, makes it apparent that the novel of plot and character has usurped the place of the novel of protest. This inconsistency may well be one of the reasons why such social novels as Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889) failed to win Gissing any but the smallest public, although they were recognized as faithful and moving portrayals of conditions that demanded reform. One reviewer of The Nether World pointed clearly to the ambiguity characteristic of Gissing's work by saying: “It is difficult to discover whether he hoped to add to that sort of fiction which has at times been more successful than Blue-books or societies in calling attention to evils crying for remedy or whether … the author chose his subject in something like an artistic spirit… His work does not show the energy either of an artist or of an enthusiast …”

scholarly journals “Self-sacrifice may be Quite Wrong”: Women’s Education and Finances in The Odd Women (1893) by George Gissing

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Samiya Alam ◽  
Aimillia Ramli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Economy And Education ◽  
The Impact

In late-nineteenth-century Britain, the surplus number of single women presented an internal crisis that accumulated in a number of debates on the subject in various fields, such as economy and education. While much have been written about these in relation to the social context of the time, little have been said specifically about the way single women and their educational and financial positions are presented in late-nineteenth-century English novels. This paper focusses on George Gissing’s (1857-1903) novel The Odd Women (1893) and its portrayal of single women and the parallel roles played by money and education in the women’s decision to remain unmarried. The method applied in this study is based on contextual as well as textual analyses and interpretation of the novel in light of feminist and Marxist literary theories. This study investigates the impact of socio-economic conditions on the lives of single women towards the end of the nineteenth century. The result of this study shows the novel makes a correlation between women’s level of education and financial situation with their choice to remain single.

Analytical Study of Violence Theme in Victoria Schwab’s This Savage Song

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Study ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Vicious Cycle ◽  
Aggressive Approach ◽  
Research Article ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
The Right

This research article focuses on the theme of violence and its representation by the characters of the novel “This Savage Song” by Victoria Schwab. How violence is transmitted through genes to next generations and to what extent socio- psycho factors are involved in it, has also been discussed. Similarly, in what manner violent events and deeds by the parents affect the psychology of children and how it inculcates aggressive behaviour in their minds has been studied. What role is played by the parents in grooming the personality of children and ultimately their decisions to choose the right or wrong way has been argued. In the light of the theory of Judith Harris, this research paper highlights all the phenomena involved: How the social hierarchy controls the behaviour. In addition, the aggressive approach of the people in their lives has been analyzed in the light of the study of second theorist Thomas W Blume. As the novel is a unique representation of supernatural characters, the monsters, which are the products of some cruel deeds, this research paper brings out different dimensions of human sufferings with respect to these supernatural beings. Moreover, the researcher also discusses that, in what manner the curse of violence creates an inevitable vicious cycle of cruel monsters that makes the life of the characters turbulent and miserable.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Levels

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

ANNE BRONTË'S SHAMEFUL AGNES GREY

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Hallemeier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agnes Grey ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

For much of the twentieth century, literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.

scholarly journals SUBLIME LOVE AND THE ETHICS OF EQUALITY IN A HOMOEROTIC NOVEL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: PRECIOUS MIRROR OF BOY ACTRESSES

NAN Nü ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Political Turmoil

AbstractPrecious Mirror of Boy Actresses is the most serious piece of fiction about male love since the late Ming and the lengthiest of all in Chinese literary history. It is remarkable in its extension of the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic that it inherits from the late Ming and from earlier Qing literature such as Dream of the Red Chamber. In the homoerotic relationship it idealizes, lovers who are rigidly separated in terms of status nevertheless experience a sublime love which necessarily results in the liberation of the man of lower status. The novel makes unique use of the qing aesthetic's idealization of the feminine to arrive at this ethically pragmatic conclusion whereby liberation is achieved. The foregrounding of this sublime love and the qing-perfected characters who embody it, moreover, link the novel with other works of the period which portray a China that is ultimately a stable and invulnerable entity. Thus Precious Mirror's interpretation of qing carries a historical significance in spite of the novel's obliviousness of the social and political turmoil of China in the mid-nineteenth century.

Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: the social context of illegitimacy in rural Kent

Rural History ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Reay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
General Phenomenon ◽  
Local Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.

scholarly journals Battling "the bane of our cities": Class, territory, and the prohibition debate in Toronto, 1877

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-48
Author(s):  
M. P. Sendbuehler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alcohol Abuse ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Option ◽  
Public Drinking ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Working

In the nineteenth century, the tavern was an important institution in urban working-class life. Because of the social ills associated with alcohol abuse and public drinking, there were frequent attempts to lessen the tavern's importance or to eliminate it entirely. This paper examines several tavern-related issues that emerged in Toronto in the 1870s and 1880s. The Crooks Act, passed in 1876, employed powerful measures to deal with political and temperance questions simultaneously. The intersection of class, politics, temperance, and urban life led to a territorial solution to the liquor question. These issues were dealt with by the people of Toronto in 1877, when they declined to prohibit public drinking in the city via the Dunkin Act, a local option prohibition statute of the Province of Canada.

scholarly journals The Relationship Between Education and Social Value in The Novel “The Magician’s Apprentice” By: Trudi Canavan

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Rohdearni Wati Sipayung
Keyword(s):  
Social Value ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

This novel  has many basic values of human, and the writer wants to share about the social value of this Novel. Although this novel tells of a witch, as we know that the stories of about witches, it may be difficult to find which part is the social value. But the writer wants to find the part that is a social value, because in every story there must be a positive value that can be taken by the reader. The social value of Cooperation, cooperation within a group can make the job easier. The social value of care. Human beings we should care about each other, helping each other and pay attention. The social value of bravery, in life we must have the courage because, as we know there are still many people who are afraid to face the people.

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