Gissing's Saturnalia: Urban Crowds, Carnivalesque Subversion and the Crisis of Paternal Authority

In this essay – an extract of a longer work in Italian (published in 2004) which tries to cover, and make sense of, all main crowd scenes in Gissing’s novels – I focus on the crowd scenes in The Nether World and In the Year of Jubilee showing how Gissing's carnivalesque mobs invading public spaces, momentarily erasing distinctions and bridging social distances, starkly contrast and significantly disrupt the tendency of his fiction to reflect and naturalise the urban zoning and segregation processes which were inherent in the transformation of the late Victorian metropolis and which, as John Goode memorably pointed out, Gissing's highly pronounced historical consciousness was ready to recognise and inscribe in his fictional topography. Harking back to archetypal modes of festive inversion, Gissing's Saturnalia both underscore the degradation of modern metropolitan culture, and look forward to a Utopian supersession of the regime of rationalized, departmentalised and wholly disenchanted modernity.