Keynote speakers

• Professor Richard Dennis, University College London (UCL)
• Professor Luisa Villa, University of Genoa

Background

‘Never’ Gissing writes to his sister Margaret, ‘read history without an Atlas’.

Events are, it seems, inextricably linked to places, to sites, to geography. Although frequently understood as a writer of social realism, heavily concerned with the events and experiences of a particular moment in the late-Victorian world whose works, despite rooted in the present, display a fascination with history, George Gissing is nonetheless a writer transfixed by place. This conference will thus aim to draw together and explore the different perspectives of this theme in order to reconsider the complexity of the spatial in the writings of Gissing.

As Henry Ryecroft postulates:

Everyone, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles me […] Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show itself to my mind’s eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search may trace its origin. [….] Sometimes the vision passes, and there an end; sometimes, however, it has successors, the memory working quite independently of my will, and no link appearing between one scene and the next. (George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903; repr. London: Chapman, 1929), p. 146)

Place is varied, multiple, rich and, at times, remarkably entwined with memory and the mind’s uncanny and phantasmagoric sequences and returns.

Call for papers

Although place and geography are the conference’s main coordinates, we also invite papers that interpret the theme in much more general terms.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• the places, settings and locations of Gissing’s works
• isomorphism, place as inspiration, or when authors visit locals of possible literary settings
• movement, space and thought, or, in Gissing’s words, ‘matters settled ambulando’
• domesticity, homes, places of rest
• homelessness, placelessness, and exile
• mobility, social, gender
• travel, transport, and/or Gissing abroad
• the practice of literary tourism, both of travel to and around sites specific to Gissing, and of Gissing’s own literary pilgrimages
• temporal landscapes, with sites as containers of the past and its histories.

Proposals of around 250 words should be sent to Rebecca.Hutcheon@bristol.ac.uk by 4 May 2016.