Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. ‘The Persistence of the “Vocalic”’: Scott and the Early Strategies of Accommodation

   • Jan B. Gordon

   Pages 1-57

3. A-filiative Families and Subversive Reproduction: Gossip in Jane Austen

   • Jan B. Gordon

   Pages 58-96

4. Parlour’s Parler: ‘The Chatter of Tongues Within …’ Wuthering Heights

   • Jan B. Gordon

   Pages 97-154

5. ‘In All Manner of Places, All at Wunst’: Writing, Gossip and the State of Information in Bleak House

   • Jan B. Gordon

   Pages 155-236

6. ‘This Alarming Hearsay’: Public Opinion and the Crisis of the Liberal Imagination in Middlemarch

   • Jan B. Gordon

   Pages 237-294

7. ‘Too Meeny’: Jude, Dorian and the Life of the Secondary

   • Jan B. Gordon

   Pages 295-381

8. Back Matter

   Pages 382-444

   PDF

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.

• Familie
• fiction
• novel

• Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan

  Jan B. Gordon

Jan B. Gordon

Policies and ethics