Living on Pea-nuts: Gissing, Fiction, Subsistence.

This essay considers the three major novels George Gissing published between 1889 and 1893: The Nether World, New Grub Street, and The Odd Women. These Long Depression novels, as they could be called, demonstrate the constant pressure exerted by the need to earn money to hold starvation at bay, to achieve an always precarious subsistence or survival. Gissing depicts circular, inescapable patterns in which one writes to earn money in order to survive just long enough to write more to buy more—never enough—food. His novels insistently ponder, and seem to try to literalize in reflexive ways, the question of what it means to "live on" one's writing as a late nineteenth‐century author. In so doing, this article suggests, these novels participate in the transformation of hunger from a troubling Malthusian fact of nature to be managed by political economy into both a biopolitical tool of the state, seen as a positive good in its spur to labor, as well as a central topos of an emerging modernist style of fiction that reflects, draws attention to, and critiques those biopolitical mechanisms. Notwithstanding his criticisms of a society that leaves artists hungry, Gissing seemed to personally believe that his own experiences of having "looked starvation in the face," having passed through "circumstances of hunger" and converted them into art, were part of what gave his work value and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]