The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
                                Volume XIII. The Victorian Age, Part One.

              XIV. George Meredith, Samuel Butler, George Gissing.

                                 § 14. Gissing’s work transitional.
 

           The novels of Gissing bear all the marks of a period of transition; they retain features of the
           passing Victorian type—sentimental, capacious, benevolently admonitory, plot-ridden; at the
           same time, they adumbrate accepted modern forms, which picture a familiar “slice of life” in a
           representation saturated with material detail, precise and complete in analysis of the inner
           world of thought and feeling. The transition was effected at an earlier time, and more
           consciously, in France, where its principles were formulated by apologists such as Taine, and
           theorists who were also practitioners, such as the disciples of Flaubert. Gissing was widely
           read in the fiction of the continent and uses his reading to finely critical purpose in the
           monograph on Dickens; it is natural, therefore, to look in him for affinities with these
           continental writers.
 
 
                                                                                      A comparison with Zola
 

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