New Grub Street


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New Grub Street

place of ruthless contest among moneymongers. [Br. Lit.: New Grub Street, Magill I, 647–649]
See: Greed
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New Grub Street was an 1891 work by which novelist?
QUIZ OF THE DAY
IF YOU THINK THE CASH NEXUS, CONSUMERISM AND debt reached their apotheosis this past year, take a look at New Grub Street, George Gissing's excoriating 1891 novel of the high Victorian era, in which every character is judged entirely by his or her yearly investment income.
Pick your antidote: ten summer books to take the edge off a dreadful year
Orwell had read only a few of the novels, but "merely on the strength of New Grub Street, Demos, and The Odd Women I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few better novelists.
New Grub Street (1891) is an unforgettable account of a novelist struggling to write when inspiration fails (Orwell found dais "the most impressive" of Gissing's novels, "also an upsetting and demoralizing book").
In New Grub Street, Edwin Reardon, the struggling novelist, and his friend Harold Biffen (who struggles even more, just to find daily bread), revive their spirits by swapping lines of Sophocles.
For instance, reading New Grub Street, one cares just as much what happens to Marian and the unscrupulous journalist Jasper Milvain as about Reardon and his writer's block.
Remembering George Gissing
No better corrective may be found than George Gissing's New Grub Street, the The Information of its day (Amis had to have had it in mind) and still a startlingly pertinent picture of the literary life.
In outline and conception New Grub Street reads like a geometric proof of the axiom that in the literary world the innocent, the idealist, and the artist are fated to fall while the sharper, the opportunist, and the poseur will rise.
New Grub Street was conceived in a time not unlike our own when an explosion of mass communications had fundamentally altered the literary equation.
Slouching towards Grubnet: the author in the Age of Publicity
On 24 April 1887 he mid his brother Algernon about a planned-but-never-completed work called "Sandray the Sophist"--"mainly a satire on the modern cultivators of literature, & more particularly periodical literature"--and one sees Gissing's first tentative approach towards the world of New Grub Street, which he would turn to after his subsequent two novels.
The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Vol. 3: 1886-1888, & Vol. 4: 1889-1891

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