Gossip and Subversion in the Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Jan Gordon rewrites the history of nineteenth-century British fiction by disclosing a liberatory 'information superhighway' in the presence of gossip and its practitioners. He begins by suggesting the simultaneous dependence upon the repression of uncorroborated eye-witness testimony in the 'pre-novels' of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The attempt to create paradigmatic 'plots' of Christian redemption forced more fabulizing theologically-unstructured 'plots' to the margins.

In Gordon's model, the evolution of the nineteenth-century novel marks the attempt of an orality persecuted by a patriarchal Republic of Letters - or its later successor a moralizing Great Tradition - to gain a proper discursive share.