Harsh Sounds: George Gissing’s Penetrating Literary Voice

This chapter tracks the emergence of a distinctive critical discourse in the 1890s intent on distinguishing the acoustic particularities of the literary voice. Taking the uneven oeuvre of George Gissing as its focus, this chapter positions his work as exemplary of this preoccupation with the problems of hearing the ‘right’ critical voices above the noise of non-literary discourse. It has long been acknowledged that Gissing’s antagonistic relationship to his subject––the English lower middle classes––renders reading his writing an unpleasant, discomforting task: as Virginia Woolf was to observe in 1912, Gissing’s hatred for the poor is ‘the reason why his voice is so harsh, so penetrating, so little grateful to the ears.’ The harsh penetration of Gissing’s literary style is largely understood as a reflection of his politics (Jameson) and, in turn, of his commitment to a ‘vitriolic’ and ‘aggressive’ realism (Matz). Complicating such critical approaches, this chapter thinks through how this literary dissonance might be understood as a reflection of the tensions between Gissing’s political impulse to show, and his aesthetic investment in a more (technically) restrained literary voice.