Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo's Economies

by J. Gordon

Overview

Jan Gordon proposes that a reviled communicational 'interest' in gossip and its purveyors be given its proper due in the development of the novel in Britain. Commencing with Sir Walter Scott's historically persecuted (but economically and politically necessary) androgynous voices in caves and concluding with Oscar Wilde's premature celebration of gossip at the very moment it is transformed from public opinion to public judgment, the author finds gossip to be both deforming and shaping nineteenth century 'letters' in surprising ways. Like the ignominious orphan-figure of nineteenth-century fiction, gossip is the 'unacknowledged reproduction' searching for a political antecedence which might lend a legitimacy to its often discontinuous testimony, for a culture historically resistant to obtrusive voices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312161651
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/27/1996
Edition description:	1996
Pages:	444
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.05(d)

About the Author

Jan B. Gordon

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements (as the Crisis of Credit) - Introduction: 'The Outside as Inside': Echo's(') Narrative Domain - 'The Persistence of the Vocalic': Scott and the Early Strategies of Accommodation - 'A-Filiative Families and Subversive Reproduction': Gossip in Jane Austen - 'Parlour's Parler: 'The Chatter of Tongues within...' Wuthering Heights - 'In All Matter of Places, All at Wunst': Writing, Gossip, and the State of Information in Bleak House - 'This Alarming Hearsay': Public Opinion and the Crisis of the Liberal Imagination in Middlemarch - 'Too Meeny': Jude, Dorian, and the Life of the Secondary - Index