First published in 2005, this collection of essays brings together British, European and North American literary critics and cultural historians with diverse specialities and interests to demonstrate the range of contemporary perspectives through which George Gissing's fiction can be viewed. It offers both closely contextualised historical readings and broader cultural and philosophical assessments and engages with a number of themes including: the cultural and social formation of class and gender, social mobility and its unsettling effects on individual and collective identities, the place of writing in emerging mass culture, and the possibility and limits of fiction as critical intervention.

This book will be of interest to those studying the works of George Gissing, and 19th century literature more broadly.