Séminaire de littérature (EAD)

Rumour and gossip in 18th-century British literature

 This course explores the central role of gossip, rumour, and scandal in shaping the literature, society, and media of the long eighteenth century. Often dismissed as frivolous, gossip and rumour were powerful social tools used to police class and gender boundaries, manage political reputations, and drive the burgeoning print industry. We will see how the rise of newspapers, magazines, and the novel transformed rumour and gossip from a purely oral phenomenon into a mass-produced literary commodity, tracing its impact from the coffeehouse to the private closet.

The aim of this class is to understand the material conditions that governed the spread of information and gossip in the period and to study the way it transformed literary genres and modes of writing.

SESSION 1

 —une épreuve sur table en 3h.

SESSION 2

—Un épreuve sur table en 2h.

niveau C1 en anglais minimum.

Connaissance du rôle de la littérature et de la presse dans l’évolution de la société britannique du XVIIIe siècle. Renforcement des compétences d’analyse de textes littéraires (roman, théâtre, poésie). Maîtrise des registres du discours.

●       Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Gossip. University of Chicago Press, 1985.

●       Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. Norton, 1990.

●       McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730. Clarendon Press, 1998.

●       Rogers, Pat. Grub Steet: studies in a subculture Methuen, 1972.

●       Parsons, Nicola. Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Palgrave, 2009

●       Habermas, Jürgen. The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT Press, 1992.

●       Eger, Elizabeth. Women, writing and the public sphere, 1700-1830. Cambridge UP, 2001.

Les textes étudiés seront mis sur Cours en ligne ou seront à lire en bibliothèque.