George Moore's Genres

Abstract

This essay examines George Moore's autobiographical writing, prose fiction, and criticism for new ways of understanding shared tensions between narrative and theatre conventions in the 1880s and 1890s. Defiantly experimenting with speculative and fictionalised reminiscence, inter-arts comparisons, and consideration of an artist's care for their own reputation, Moore offers a rich field for explorations of the longevity and obsolescence of textual forms. Moore's reminiscences of British and French Impressionist painters focus more intently on the emergence of their reputations than their actual technical innovations, extending a habit developed in his novels of the 1880s of treating artistic production as small cells of a much wider network of affiliated entertainment industries. Likewise, his alternately gossipy and prescient art and theatre criticism maps surprising relations between the reception of Japanese prints, naturalism in England, changing theatrical conventions, and the influence of print journalism in ways that defy the usual periodising histories of Victorian and Edwardian fiction.