Social Mobility in the English Bildungsroman- Gissing, Hardy, Bennett, and Lawrence

Examines four novelists in terms of the social mobility observed in their novels, and accounts for formal innovation and disjunction within the novels in terms of ideological conflict, seeing the genre itself as a bearer of ideology. Resists thinking about literature as a self-referential system and instead explores its connection to those social practices through which we constitute our world.