Economy and Epistemology of Gossip in 19th- and early 20th-Century US-American Literature and Culture

19世纪末20世纪初，美国文化的特点是隐私、公开、投机和风险的概念发生了重大变化，这些变化至今仍影响着我们对这些术语的理解。这一文学和文化研究项目断言，一种迄今被忽视的知识生产和流通形式，即八卦，为解决这些问题提供了一个有洞察力的视角。因此，通过分析现实主义小说以及商业出版物和个人的生活写作，它试图回答八卦知道什么以及如何知道，以及这些知识有什么价值的问题。它对女性的关注通过研究那些生活在理应与世隔绝的私人领域、法律地位往往不稳定的个人--与上述转变的学术和当代讨论中通常假定的那些人不同--为现有的学术研究增加了至关重要的见解。该项目声称，由于女性无法(或至少是能力有限)参与市场，她们的私生活变得“经济”，许多女性成为自己适婚和其他形式社会资本存量的投机者。在这个星座中，八卦--作为谣言和丑闻的种子，以及原本无法获得或无法分享的知识的来源--成为一种主要商品。因此，这个项目通过强调八卦作为具有金融利害关系的社会投机的用途，从而增强了我们对19世纪末八卦作为一种贸易文章的理解，超越了它与新兴黄色报刊的相关性。它进一步明确了八卦的认识论地位和知识传播的潜力，并将这些见解与现实主义小说的叙事策略联系起来，以应对新的文化语境和审美需求。在对八卦经济和文学认识论分析的基础上，对美国档案馆(如国会图书馆、纽约公共图书馆)原始材料中八卦痕迹的研究，为女性在应对金融投机、风险管理和重新评估隐私的社会文化力量方面打开了新的视角(个人和公共、秘密和共享)。此外，本研究还将流言传播作为一种实践，用来处理家庭领域内的不确定性和不确定的知识。因此，它考察了八卦作为一种历史知识的价值，它不同于彼得·伯克所说的关于科学和制度的“明确的”、“纯粹的”和“普遍的”知识。通过这种对被认为是不合法的、有偏见的或部分的知识来源的转变，这种对世纪之交美国文学和文化的调查使假设的公共和私人/家庭和经济之间的二分法复杂化，这是官方文件坚持的，并促进了我们对现实主义小说叙事策略的理解。

Late 19th and early 20th century US-American culture is characterized by crucial changes in the conception of privacy, publicity, speculation, and risk, which still influence our understanding of these terms today. This literary and cultural studies research project asserts that a hitherto neglected form of knowledge production and circulation, namely gossip, provides an insightful lens through which to address these issues. Analyzing realist fiction as well as commercial publications and private individuals’ life writing, it therefore seeks to answer the questions of what and how gossip knows, and what this knowledge is worth. Its focus on women adds crucial insights to existing scholarship by looking at individuals who – in contrast to those usually assumed in scholarly and contemporary discussions of the above-mentioned transformations – inhabit the supposedly secluded private sphere and whose legal status is often precarious. The project claims that as women are unable (or at least limited in their ability) to participate in the marketplace, their private lives become themselves ‘economic’ and many women become speculators in the stock of their own marriageability and other forms of social capital. In this constellation, gossip – as the seed of rumor and scandal, and as a source of otherwise unavailable or unshareable knowledge – emerges as a prime commodity. This project thus enhances our understanding of gossip as an article of trade in the late 19th century beyond its relevance for emerging yellow press magazines by underscoring gossip’s use as social speculation with financial stakes. It further specifies gossip’s epistemological status and potential for knowledge dissemination and connects these insights to realist fiction’s narratological strategies for dealing with new cultural contexts and aesthetic demands. Building on and complimenting the analysis of gossip’s economy and epistemology in literature, the study of gossip’s traces in primary material at archives in the US (e.g. Library of Congress, New York Public Library) opens new perspectives on women’s (individual and communal, secret and shared) strategies in dealing with socio-cultural forces of financial speculation, risk management, and the re-evaluation of privacy. Furthermore, this research illustrates the circulation of gossip as a practice with which to approach uncertainty and uncertain knowledge within the domestic sphere. It therefore investigates gossip’s value as a historical knowledge that differs from what Peter Burke calls the ‘explicit,’ ‘pure,’ and ‘universal’ knowledge of sciences and institutions. Through this shift to a source of knowledge considered illegitimate, biased, or partial, this inquiry into turn-of-the-century US-American literature and culture complicates the assumed dichotomies between public and private / domestic and economic, which 'official' documents insist on, and advances our understanding of narrative strategies in realist fiction.