Entirely to my taste

A new scholar book with Brontë-related content:

A world within the world : George Gissing's vision of art and literature
Edited by Maria Teresa Chialant, Emanuela Ettorre, Christine Huguet
Aracne Editrice
July 2018
ISBN 9788825515879

The essays collected in this volume purposely call for multidisciplinary approaches and propose to focus on all aspects of Gissing (1857–1903) as an artist, notably his engagement with late Victorian aesthetics. If New Grub Street immediately comes to mind as Gissing’s most famous experiment with the conventions of the Künstlerroman, fascinating portraits of the artist are to be found disseminated in the rest of the corpus. Many of his letters and personal writings similarly show him (re)inventing himself as a unique voice, raising interpretative interrogations upon the medium used by fellow writers, by contemporary artists and himself. To the critic, such comments scattered throughout Gissing’s writing career have now become invaluable language wondering about language. Indeed, in most of Gissing’s work there is a tension between a pragmatic, almost sociological urge and the expression of artistic leanings, of an inward turning; his fractured and unresolved artistic polarities are apprehended in two different ways in this volume. While some of the contributors explore aesthetic inheritances and anticipations, interrogate affinities and situate the novelist’s fictional constructs within the broader context of Victorian cultural history, others address Gissing’s taxonomy of the artist more directly.

Includes the chapter:

"Entirely to my taste": Gissing's reception of Charlotte Brontë by Constance D. Harsh