New Grub Street (1891) - George Gissing
Related: UK - novel - 1891 - writing - literature of the UK - novel - London
Among the earliest and best novels about the business of authorship, New Grub Street draws a map of the late-Victorian publishing industry. Gissing highlights the split between literary writing and popular journalism, typified in magazines like the newly launched Tit-Bits, anticipating a hundred years of subsequent debate about art and mass culture. --MR via 1001 Books
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Review
The most impressive of Gissing?s books . . . England has produced very few better novelists. --George Orwell
Book Description
New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing's most highly regarded novel, is the story of men and women forced to make their living by writing. Their daily lives and broken dreams, made and marred by the rigors of urban life and the demands of the fledgling mass communications industry, are presented with vivid realism and unsentimental sympathy. Its telling juxtaposition of the writing careers of the clever and malicious Jaspar Milvain and the honest and struggling Edward Reardon quickly made New Grub Street into a classic work of late Victorian fiction.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
New Grub Street is a novel by George Gissing published in 1891.
The story is about the literary world that Gissing inhabited, its intrigues, and its petty quarrels. The protagonist is one Jasper Milvain, a selfish and unscrupulous hack writer who rejects artistic endeavour for material gain. A number of more or less sympathetic literary characters — the artist, the poor scholar, the learned pedant — are contrasted to Milvain, but it is Milvain who triumphs at the end of the novel, showing that self-promotion is more useful in the world than artistic sensibility.
The themes of the novel are strongly autobiographical. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Grub_Street [Oct 2005]