Retrospect in literary criticism allows us certain neat symmetries and clear panoramas: it lets us call The Pickwick Papers the first Victorian novel and Jude the Obscure the last, and it encourages us to use the arbitrary divisions of decades and centuries to chart the history of literature. Sometimes retrospect affords too suspiciously precise a literary-historical calendar. But sometimes it lets us see how literature may have been confronting the problem of its chronology – of its own existence in time – all along. At certain points in literary history, for example, we can sense the novel's sharp awareness of having reached some kind of new territory. We feel its exhilaration that a new kind of expression or representation is suddenly possible. But at other times we can feel the novel's anxiety that those same things have become no longer possible or sustainable. A certain kind of writing might be aware of its own expiration – it might even be the conscious agent of its own demise.

New Grub Street is a fine example of this kind of destructive self-consciousness: Gissing's novel emerges from a culture of realist fiction and even sets its scene there, all the while enacting that very movement's death. It comes not to praise realism but to bury it. In a sense the wider scene of late Victorian fiction was doing something quite similar: testing the far limits of realism, describing what they were like, and releasing the satirical vapors native to those reaches. The late Victorian novel was at once interested in the possibilities of realism and intent on exposing its boundaries.