Gossip+subversion in 19c Britain Fiction

ISBN: 9780312161651

出版社: Palgrave Macmillan

出版年: 1996-11

页数: 460

定价: $ 175.15

装帧: HRD

内容简介

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.