- Joined
- Mar 29, 2018
Lit sperge: My vote for best prose of the 'Victorian' era: Ambrose Bierce. Not all 'victorians' were flaccid creatures devoted to excess verbiage. His reportage of his Civil War service is very modern in tone and far more moving than similar works of his more 'sentimental' contemporaries. Could be the antidote to too much Poe.
Ambrose Bierce - good one. Also recommend.
My pick is George Gissing, especially his masterpiece New Grub Street - about a talented writer who had a little success with this elegant fiction, so quits the day job and blows the cash on a European trip. He meets a socially ambitious girl seemingly dazzled by his literary talent (aka earning potential) and marries her. Under pressure to hack product for the trashmag market but unwilling to compromise his artistic ideals, his health and marriage fail. Basing the book on personal experiences, Gissing wrote New Grub Street in apt 'hack' circumstances: 4,000 words a day; two months tops.
Now that literary world has long gone, but the same forces Gissing describes are still at work, not only in publishing but more visibly - and with far greater effect - in the corporately-personalised product that makes for contemporary online 'culture'. With its theme of winners and losers, technological change, and the motivations/seductions of status, greed and power, NGS also has relevance with how it illustrates the threats and the opportunities of new mass culture/industry to how people perceive both themselves and those around them.
George Gissing - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Read it here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1709