The hero of Jude the Obscure, the next novel in this series, Jude Fawley, a working-class boy who dreams of becoming an Oxford scholar, is Reardon's West Country equivalent. New Grub Street is Victorian in its realist depiction of a society in transition, but modern in the way it harks forward to the imminent new century with its portrait of the artist as an existential character making his solitary way in the world. "I speak," he says, "only of good, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar." Reardon will die, unfulfilled, in poverty Milvain will flourish in literary London ("I write for the upper-middle-class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness"), navigate a complicated love life, and eventually marry Reardon's widow, Amy. The novel's protagonists are a contrasted pair of writers: thoughtful Edwin Reardon, a shy "literary" novelist with few commercial prospects and Jasper Milvain, a hard-driving young journalist who treats his writing as the means to an end in a ruthless literary marketplace. As one character puts it: "Our Grub Street of today is supplied with telegraphic communications, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy." By the 1890s, Grub Street no longer existed, though hack writing, of course, never goes away, with timeless imperatives. In New Grub Street, the narrative is set in the literary world with which Gissing himself was intimately familiar the title refers to the London street that, in the age of Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne ( No 6 in this series), was synonymous with hack writing.
#Best widscreen grub theme professional
In 2014, in the midst of another paradigm shift, Gissing's subject remains as topical as ever, and addresses timeless themes in the everyday life of the full-time, professional writer. A year before New Grub Street, Henry James also published a novel, The Tragic Muse, about "the conflict between art and 'the world'", though James focused on painting and the stage more than literature. Gissing was hardly alone in finding the role and conduct of the modern writer an urgent topic in late Victorian literary London.
It is also the animating idea of New Grub Street. This is one of the main themes in John Carey's important critical study The Intellectuals and the Masses.
Henceforth, high and low literary culture would increasingly diverge. For the rest of the century, the lives of writers and readers would undergo a profound transformation which would comprehensively reshape the British literary landscape. Gissing's career as a man of letters was the product of this. Part of this is due to the social and cultural upheavals inspired by Forster's Education Act of 1870. He never delves as painfully as Gissing does into the threadbare texture of Victorian literary life. George Gissing, born the son of a chemist in 1857, was breaking important new ground, as well as responding to significant cultural change in the literary generation after Dickens ( David Copperfield) and Thackeray ( Pendennis).īy contrast, the eponymous hero of David Copperfield ( No 15 in this series) is a writer, of course, but Dickens's focus is chiefly on Copperfield's childhood, not his career as a novelist.
#Best widscreen grub theme series
New Grub Street is the first novel in this series explicitly to address, in a realistic narrative, the contemporary working conditions of a new class, the professional author.
0 kommentar(er)
