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The Nether World - Oxford World's Classics
George Gissing
The Nether World - Oxford World's Classics
George Gissing
The Nether World (1889) is generally regarded as the finest of Gissing's early novels. A fast moving story of highly dramatic, sometimes violent scenes, it depicts life amongst the artisans, factory-girls, and slum-dwellers of Clerkenwell in the 1870s. But this is not just a novel of documentary realism. It is one man's mordant vision - shaped by bitter personal experience of poverty - of the quality of life endured by a variety of characters in the netherworld. With Zolaesque intensity and relentlessness, Gissing lays bare the economic forces which determine the aspirations and expectations of those born to a life of labour. This is a tale of intrigue, as rapacious schemers try to wrest a fortune out of a mysterious old man who has returned to their midst, and of thwarted love. There is no sentimentality. This is a world in which the strong exercise power against their own kind, scheming and struggling for survival, a world from which, Gissing bleakly maintains, there can be no escape.
448 pages
Media | Books Paperback Book (Book with soft cover and glued back) |
Released | December 11, 2008 |
ISBN13 | 9780199538287 |
Publishers | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 448 |
Dimensions | 129 × 196 × 21 mm · 312 g |
Editor | Gill, Stephen (Reader in English Literature, Reader in English Literature, Oxford University and Fellow of Lincoln College) |
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