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George Gissing and the Fictional Work of Biography
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 55, Number 4, Autumn 2015
- pp. 879-897
- 10.1353/sel.2015.0039
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay argues that George Gissing develops his critical ideas about realism by correlating the balance of life and work in biography with the realist novelist’s negotiation between external details and subjective impressions in fiction. In The Unclassed (1884), New Grub Street (1891), and Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), Gissing recognizes the realist aesthetic as vulnerable to the imaginative constraints of biography. Yet these works also suggest that the late Victorian conversation about realism involved a reimagining of biography’s critical uses that would account for the lives of genres as well as authors.