Member Profile
Name:
Mr Stephen Whiting
Institution:
University of Leeds
Academic status:
Student
Main discipline:
Literary Studies
Additional disciplines:
Other societies:
British Association of Modernist Studies
Research interests:
My PhD thesis concerns late Victorian and early Modernist/Edwardian authors, including George Gissing, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. I am researching representations of masculine anxiety during the period, particularly in relation to the male reader and writer. Given the cultural baggage regarding the novel and reading more generally (as effeminate or a sign of degeneration) I am interested in how male authors dealt with their own form within their writing: whether warily as a symptom of a broader fin de siecle malaise, ironically, or as a way of reclaiming and "remasculinizing" a feminized form. My current chapter examines George Gissing's 'New Grub Street' as a lamentation on the increasing influence of the market on the literary world by exploring Gissing's conflation of the writer and the prostitute. As Elaine Showalter has shown, the very nature of the writer (as someone who sells not only a part of themselves through their imagination but, at times, their very self) comes uncomfortably close to the prostitute. Gissing's novel makes this comparison more explicit, and adds extra credence through the ubiquity of the late-Victorian marketplace. His degenerating and pseudo-syphilitic writer (suffering from an unnamed degenerating disease inherently linked to their career) becomes a powerful symbol of the "prostituting" effects of the brave new world of the fin de siecle literary market.