Ivan Kreilkamp - “Living on Pea-nuts: George Gissing in the Long Depression”
Channel: Department of English, Arizona State University
Date: 2021-11-04

Ivan Kreilkamp, Professor of English at Indiana University and co-editor of Victorian Studies, delivers the annual Ian Fletcher Memorial Lecture. 

Professor Kreilkamp's talk is titled “Living on Pea-nuts: George Gissing in the Long Depression.” It focuses on the three major novels published by George Gissing between 1889 and 1893, The Nether World, New Grub Street, and The Odd Women: novels that depict the constant pressure exerted by the need to earn money to hold starvation at bay and to achieve an always precarious subsistence or survival. Gissing’s fiction does not simply depict hunger and poverty, however, but in different ways seems to aim to turn hunger and scarcity into a style and form that are at once austere, a depiction of austerity, and an effort to transcend that state. In doing so, these novels insistently ponder, and seem to try to literalize in reflexive ways, the question of what it means to “live on” one’s writing or productions as a late-nineteenth-century author.

About the speaker
Ivan Kreilkamp teaches in the Department of English at Indiana University. He's the author of Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge University Press, 2005 ) and Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and is at work on a book about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad for Columbia University Press’s new Rereadings series. 

Co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Victorian Studies, Kreilkamp has also published widely on contemporary fiction, film, and pop music in Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

This event was sponsored by the Department of English in honor of Professor Ian Fletcher (1920-1988). It was also generously supported by the Institute for Humanities Research, the School of International Letters and Cultures, and the Office of the Dean of Humanities in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.