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Abstract
This thesis examines how conceptions of the voice in literature that emerged over the Victorian period adapted to, and were not silenced by, the noises of a relentlessly modernising world. From Thomas Carlyle through to Friedrich Kittler, it has long been argued that literature’s capacity to channel voices dissipated with the advent of the mass-circulation of print matter, the emergence of new media technologies and expanded communication networks. These changes are said to alter the relationship we have with literature, repudiating its Romantic promise as an inspired medium and revealing writing to be little more than a selective means of communication. And yet, writers who were witness to these changes – including Matthew Arnold, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Henry James and George Gissing – sought to maintain a critical and cultural appreciation for the distinctive qualities of literary form. Their critical and literary writing reveals a continual effort to differentiate the novel, or at least ‘Literary’ forms of the novel, above more ordinary forms of print matter. The voice remained a potent point of reference in this respect. Be it through a residual belief in a Romantic ideal of an inspired literary voice or an attention to the ways in which literary style summons a distinctive voice in the reading mind, these significant literary figures hold on to a vocal conception of literature.
Building on the recent critical attention to sound and mediation in literary studies, this thesis focuses on how literature speaks to its reader. Close readings and comparative analyses of the writing of Arnold through to Gissing reveal a sustained exploration of the interruptions and interferences that conspire against the mediation and reception of the literary voice. Recognising the complex and nuanced understanding of auditory reception in this period, this thesis considers how this pervasive concern with voices not being heard is not just a repudiation of the industrialisation of print culture. Instead, what emerges is a more far-reaching interrogation of the limits of communication, which is necessarily and inevitably constrained by the noise of unwanted stimuli. The fine-grained and persistent examination of literary mediation revealed by these writers, this thesis argues, resituates the late nineteenth-century novel as central to a more broadly conceived argument for the need to attune the reader’s ear to differences between voices amidst the noise of modern life.