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.
- ISBN10 0230376940
- ISBN13 9780230376946
- Publish Date 27 November 1996 (first published 1 January 1996)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
- Format eBook
- Pages 464
- Language English