This essay examines how nineteenth-century American literature paved the way for the modern exposure of private life in such disparate venues as the gossip column, social media, and reality television. In particular, this essay examines the sketch form, a popular nineteenth-century prose genre that has often been characterized as a minor form in comparison to the novel. In examining the history of the sketch form, this essay shows how the sketch conveyed reservations about the interiority and exposures central to the novel form. As practiced by Washington Irving, the earliest popularizer of this genre, the sketch advocated respectful discretion, the avoidance of private matters, and social stasis, the latter of which positioned the sketch in opposition to the social mobility characteristic of the novel. Irving presented the sketch as the genre of literary discretion, but its latter practitioner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, used the sketch to divulge confidences and violate social decorum. Willis adapted the sketch to become a precursor of the gossip column and to mirror the novel form in exposing private life.

After a short discussion of the actual typescripts and manuscripts of Lowell’s letters, this chapter centers on the published books of letters, which have become a central, rewarding part of Lowell’s oeuvre. On the level of style, Lowell’s letters can help us hear the poems better: above all, they make audible the comic tones under-recognized in his poetry. On the level of content, the letters shed light on Lowell’s literary contexts, his interests, and his thinking in specific poems: When Lowell writes to other poets about their work, he frequently reveals quite a bit about his own. And finally, the letters create an autobiography that encompasses gossip, complaint, apology, argument, critique, and confession.

Grandmothers found/find many ways of making old age enjoyable. They grow scented, flowering plants, indoors and outdoors. They sew and knit. Shopping tests their wits – in the past dealing with street hawkers and market stalls, now online. Home entertainment included playing musical instruments and games of skill, chief amongst them mahjong. Entertainment has expended dramatically in the Reform Era, in the home (television, streaming) and outside; public parks have become places for the ederly to dance, sing and play games.

Gossip was once a mainstay of the life of old women, within the home and in the neighbourhood. In the Mao Era old women were enlisted to watch out for politically incorrect behaviour and to enforce new rules. The advent of modern communications has reduced in-person gossip, but it still has uses, not least in the search for suitable matches for grandchildren.

In the Reform Era the horizons of old people have expanded. They can travel, embark on new careers; those widowed can remarry. Their grandchildren remain the centre of their lives, even if some of the behaviour of modern youth is incomprehensible.

Satire is often thought to differ in spirit or function from libel, defamation, gossip, and scandal. Many of the traditional ways scholars have defined satire – as a serious, high-minded mode focused on moral reform – enforce this distinction: the more frivolous and gossipy a satire is, the less it appears to be satire. This essay considers Lady Anne Hamilton’s satire, The Epics of the Ton; or, The Glories of the Great World (1807), a poem that challenges the traditional distinction between satire and gossip. Rare among satires in conceding its reliance on gossip, Hamilton’s poem surveys the sexual misdeeds of London’s fashionable classes, cloaking the identities of the targets. In presenting satire as a mode of printed gossip, Epics confounds the usual gender associations of satire. The poem contests the view, since John Dryden at least, of satire as a public, “manly” mode far removed from the furtive, gossipy genres associated with women, such as secret history and roman à clef. Hamilton uses the cloaked identities in her poem to replicate the play of gossip, where one scandalous tale ensnares many victims. By inviting identification of targets, Hamilton entraps readers into creating the gossip that is supposedly antithetical to satire.

The spy craze that consumed the authorities of the combatant states was based on the belief that certain groups of civilians were privy to secret information that they were eager to pass on to the enemy. This proposition may have been true in regard to a few individuals, but in relation to society as a whole, or even a part thereof, it was nonsense. There is no better proof of this than the enormous hunger for up-to-date information that was felt by the populations of all the warring states. Civilians generally did not possess or provide the enemy with valuable information, yet they themselves often felt confused and were keen, if not desperate, to satisfy their own curiosity. This is evidenced by the extraordinary popularity of the newspapers (so-called war tourism) and all manner of rumours and gossip. Relatively new media – cinema and modern museums – were also harnessed in the service of information and propaganda.

The focus of Chapter 3 is mainly on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. I argue that the expansion of social subsystems triggered by colonial modernity unfolds against a background of different historical rhythms, not all of which are explicitly foregrounded within the novels. I suggest that these barely visible overlapping histories generate a number of rhetorical sedimentations to the representation of both historical processes and the Igbo ethno-text (ethnographic details) that also illustrate the subtle and not-so-subtle disruptions of colonial modernity. To grasp the nature of the multi-synchronous historical character of these texts, I read both the historical and ethnographic details of Achebe’s novels as discursive thresholds rather than as cultural particularities. Thus, the characters Okonkwo and Ezeulu are both victims of historical transformations of which they are barely conscious.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, Okonkwo, Ezeulu, colonial modernity, colonial interpellation, Fanon, foundational narratives, gossip, osu (sacred caste), slavery in nineteenth-century West Africa, David Scott, Georg Lukács, the historical novel, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, volatile proximity between different historical lifeworlds, Christianity, ethical choice.

This chapter deals with the processes of exclusion and inclusion that defined community. It deals with popular hostility to religious change, especially the ‘disciplinary revolution’ that Puritans attempted to impose. It discusses witches as the reverse of neighbourly ideals, and hostility to perceived antisocial practices such as informing. The place of the established poor is scrutinized, as are measures against the mobile poor. Dearth, famine and disease are assessed as acid tests of communal solidarities, and it is shown that in many communities the poor were excluded from ideas of neighbourhood during times of food scarcity or the circulation of infectious disease. The role of wealthier villagers and townsmen in the government of small communities receives attention. The focus of the chapter is on the hard edge of neighbourhood.

Shortly before the presidential election, the Washington Post released a videotape from 2005 in which Donald Trump described “grabbing [women] by the pussy.” Trump dismissed the exchange as “locker-room banter,” meaning a non-serious, not necessarily truthful and thus essentially harmless exchange of a kind that is common when men talk among themselves. This chapter analyzes this type of “banter,” among (presumptively) heterosexual men talking about sex, as a ritualized social practice which helps to maintain and reproduce a “fratriarchal” form of structural male dominance. The chapter also considers what the videotape adds to our understanding of Trump’s communication style and his speaking persona, along lines of class and masculinity. Vulgarity and “lewdness” are among the linguistic resources the wealthy Trump has deployed in his bid to be seen by less privileged Americans, especially disaffected White working-class men, as a “man of the people.” While the language he used on the tape may have damaged his prospects with some voters, it made him seem more appealing to others.

While commentators tend to assume a single public culture, this chapter begins to develop an argument for a more fragmentary London world, in which there are many relatively small sets and circles, which provide many people, especially women, with the core of their social life.Close examination of the diaries of Marianne Ayrton and Eliza Soane allows us to see how very bounded women’s sociability and intimacies often were in practice. The chapter compares male and female experience and the relatively more open character of male expectations, in contrast to a female world where contacts were often very more rigorously policed.Using a range of diary sources it is possible to see that many women were rooted in ‘little platoons’ dominated by family and the business concerns of their husbands, while men were less socially constrained.Nonetheless, the chapter lays the ground for questioning how far the repression of the 1790s might have had differential effects, forcing men to question the reliability of their wider acquaintance.

This chapter is about social networking sites and social media. Bracketing direct and private communication through other modalities (e.g., email, IM, chat/text), the remaining types of communication made possible through social media are examined. This chapter reviews mass-personal communication perspective on social media. This chapter offers three themes to understand social media use: social media as the social news, social media as the archive of self, and social media as bridging social capital. Social news is the idea that we use social media to advertise the events of our lives and read about the lives of others. The archive of self refers to both the searchability and permanence of our digital connections made possible with social media. Theories of social capital were among the first perspectives to develop during the rise of social media, and the value of social media for bridging social capital is examined in this chapter.

During the 1990s, the daily talk show became a popular television format in Germany as well as in other countries; stations worldwide began to fill many hours of afternoon viewing with such programming, which typically involves the participation of one or more hosts and a number of invited guests, often ordinary people, who provide expertise, recount an event, or simply share their point of view on a given topic.

In addressing the evolutionary significance of gossip, Barkow (1992 , p. 628) hypothesized a classification of relevant topics (“relative standing and anything likely to affect it, control over resources, sexual activities, births and deaths, current alliances/friendships and political involvements, health, and reputation about reliability as a partner in social exchange”), as well as the categories of people who are the subjects of gossip (“relatives, rivals, mates, offspring, partners in social exchange, and the very high ranking”). In this study, these two classifications were tested against and compared with a quantitative content analysis of the talk show topics for 1996 derived from the main daily talk shows on four of the five major German television networks.

All of the hypothesized categorical topics and persons were present, but it was necessary to add three additional topics (“family business,” “aesthetics,” and “dangers”) and two categories of people (“me” and “animals”; pets were usually classified as people rather than topics as they frequently tend to be considered as family members).

Since the number of viewers for each episode was also coded, the effect or success of the various topics and hosts could be numerically calculated. The host is the single most important factor affecting number of viewers. If we assume that this stability reflects a strong core of regular viewers, it would appear that we are looking at the formation of relatively stable virtual gossip groups attendant to a central figure, the talk show host.

This chapter also characterizes the differences between everyday conversation and gossip and, in an effort to further understand the function of mass media, it addresses the highly ritualized nature of the television talk show.

This introduction provides the setting of the book and the conceptual framework used to rethink how we understand identity on the Swahili coast. It provides historiography and the organization of the book.

This chapter examines the process of how diverse societies, each who made Bagamoyo “their own,” came to recognize one another as members of a shared space. It examines the social links, networks, and exchanges which knit together a local identity based on familiarity of place and the inhabitants who dwelled there. Using a variety of cultural categories, such as religion, sports, dance, and town gossip, this chapter explores social phenomena which became part of the community lore that reinforced one’s sense of being Wabagamoyo. While Africans, Asians, and Europeans might be divided by cultural backgrounds, they could all identify themselves as Wabagamoyo through their familiarity with common local references, such as people, places, or events – the town’s shared vocabulary. Such social networks both divided town loyalties and mutually reinforced a sense of local identity. Rivalries in Bagamoyo’s history provided the bread and butter of local gossip, legend, and lore. To be a Bagamoyo “insider” was to know the local personalities and appreciate the history behind the rivalries.