George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea (1901) as a Paradise of Idleness

Liedke, Heidi

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95861-3_11

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“…208–9; Chialant, 2010, pp. 106–7; Liedke, 2018, pp. 240–41, 245), he also performs another version of that here 15 .…”

Section: Gissing's “Thrice‐beloved Naples”mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rosalyn Jolly shows Gissing's willfully seeing the lost classical era before him as he renounces an English faith in industrial progress. Heidi Liedke extends Jolly's reading by using the critics Walter Benjamin and Michel De Certeauto examine Gissing's narrative, subjective “emotional appropriation of time”(Liedke, 2018, p. 232). Identifying Gissing as a descendent of “idling” Romantic travel writers, she also emphasizes his renunciation of a modern English “mentality of busyness” for an Italian model of leisure (p. 236).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Thrice‐beloved Belly of Naples: Nostalgia and privation in George Gissing and Matilde Serao

Maltz

2020

Literature Compass

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During visits to Italy between 1888 and 1890, George Gissing immersed himself in fictions by Matilde Serao, a journalist, editor, and leading practitioner of verismo (Italian realism), whose stories focused on the travails of the poor of Naples. Partly as a means of practicing his Italian and partly for his own pleasure, Gissing read serial installments of her novels Addio, Amore! (1890) and Il Paese di Cuccagna (1891). The latter novel, translated into English as The Land of Cockayne (or, The Land of Milk and Honey) in 1901, dramatized the damage wrought upon Naples' social and economic life by its state lottery. Swept up by lottery fever, locals forfeit their savings, exploit each other for loans, and ruin one another's lives. Cockayne invites comparisons with Gissing's The Whirlpool (1897), which captured a culture preoccupied with precarious financial investments, and In the Year of Jubilee (1894), which famously satirized the frenzy of the crowd. Yet, upon closer look, these comparisons do not fully hold. Serao's characters are city people, but they are strongly imprinted by a lingering peasant consciousness. Earnest in their domestic roles, these wives and daughters feel none of the troubling temptations of modernity. All of Serao's men and women hold an enduring folk belief in dreams and premonitions, the means by which they choose their lottery numbers. This was likely the source of Gissing's pleasure in the book. While aspects of Cockayne mirror the modernity of his fictions, Serao's Neapolitans evince an older worldview that intrigues him.

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“…208–9; Chialant, 2010, pp. 106–7; Liedke, 2018, pp. 240–41, 245), he also performs another version of that here 15 .…”

Section: Gissing's “Thrice‐beloved Naples”mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%