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Idle Talk, Deadly Talk : The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature
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ISBN: 0813941636 0813941628 081394161X Year: 2018 Publisher: Charlottesville, Virginia : University of Virginia Press,

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The first book-length study of gossip's place in the literature of the multilingual Caribbean reveals gossip to be a utilitarian and deeply political practice-a means of staging the narrative tensions, and waging the narrative battles, that mark Caribbean politics and culture. Revising the overly gendered existing critical frame, Rodríguez Navas argues that gossip is a fundamentally adversarial practice that at once surveils identities and empowers writers to skirt sanitized, monolithic historical accounts by weaving alternative versions of their nations' histories from this self-governing discursive material. Reading recent fiction from the Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean and their diasporas, alongside poetry, song lyrics, journalism, memoirs, and political essays, Idle Talk, Deadly Talk maps gossip's place in the Caribbean and reveals its rich possibilities as both literary theme and narrative device.


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Word of mouth : gossip and American poetry
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ISBN: 1421425386 9781421425382 9781421425375 1421425378 Year: 2018 Publisher: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press

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The first study of modern and contemporary poetry's vibrant exchange with gossip. Can the art of gossip help us to better understand modern and contemporary poetry? Gossip's ostensible frivolity may seem at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression. But in Word of Mouth, Chad Bennett explores the dynamic relationship between gossip and American poetry, uncovering the unexpected ways that the history of the modern lyric intertwines with histories of sexuality in the twentieth century. Through nuanced readings of Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, and James Merrill--poets who famously absorbed and adapted the loose talk that swirled about them and their work--Bennett demonstrates how gossip became a vehicle for alternative modes of poetic practice. By attending to gossip's key role in modern and contemporary poetry, he recognizes the unpredictable ways that conventional understandings of the modern lyric poem have been shaped by, and afforded a uniquely suitable space for, the expression of queer sensibilities. Evincing an ear for good gossip, Bennett presents new and illuminating queer contexts for the influential poetry of these four culturally diverse poets. Word of Mouth establishes poetry as a neglected archive for our thinking about gossip and contributes a crucial queer perspective to current lyric studies and its renewed scholarly debate over the status and uses of the lyric genre.

The first lady of Hollywood : a biography of Louella Parsons
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ISBN: 9780520940246 0520940245 1423717325 9781423717324 1598755870 9781598755879 9780520242135 0520242130 1282358715 9781282358713 9786612358715 0520249852 Year: 2005 Publisher: Berkeley : University of California Press,

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Hollywood celebrities feared her. William Randolph Hearst adored her. Between 1915 and 1960, Louella Parsons was America's premier movie gossip columnist and in her heyday commanded a following of more than forty million readers. This first full-length biography of Parsons tells the story of her reign over Hollywood during the studio era, her lifelong alliance with her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and her complex and turbulent relationships with such noted stars, directors, and studio executives as Orson Welles, Joan Crawford, Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan, and Frank Sinatra-as well as her rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell. Loved by fans for her "just folks," small-town image, Parsons became notorious within the film industry for her involvement in the suppression of the 1941 film Citizen Kane and her use of blackmail in the service of Hearst's political and personal agendas. As she traces Parsons's life and career, Samantha Barbas situates Parsons's experiences in the broader trajectory of Hollywood history, charting the rise of the star system and the complex interactions of publicity, journalism, and movie-making. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched, The First Lady of Hollywood is both an engrossing chronicle of one of the most powerful women in American journalism and film and a penetrating analysis of celebrity culture and Hollywood power politics.


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Fooling with the Amish : Amish mafia, entertaining fakery, and the evolution of reality TV
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ISBN: 9781421444192 Year: 2022 Publisher: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press,

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"Amish Mafia was a fake reality TV show that aired on Discovery Channel from 2012 to 2015. This book examines the show's rhetorical techniques, audience reception, and cultural circumstances to address two general questions: How and why are people taken in by falsehoods in the media? What is it about the so-called reality of reality entertainments that appeals to and gratifies viewers? The book's ultimate answer to these questions, supported with many kinds of evidence, is that, in taking liberties with facts, Amish Mafia and other forms of entertaining fakery, including fake news, work very much like gossip"--

Gossip, markets, and gender : how dialogue constructs moral value in post-socialist Kilimanjaro
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ISBN: 0299220907 9780299220907 029922094X 9780299220945 0299220931 9780299220938 Year: 2007 Publisher: Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press,

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"All traders are thieves, especially women traders," people often assured social anthropologist Tuulikki Pietila; during her field work in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, in the mid-1990s. Equally common were stories about businessmen who had "bought a spirit" for their enrichment. Pietila; places these and similar comments in the context of the liberalization of the Tanzanian economy that began in the 1980s, when many men and women found themselves newly enmeshed in the burgeoning market economy. Even as emerging private markets strengthened the position of enterprising people, economic resources did not automatically lead to heightened social position. Instead, social recognition remained tied to a complex cultural negotiation through stories and gossip in markets, bars, and neighborhoods. With its rich ethnographic detail, 'Gossip, Markets, and Gender' shows how gossip and the responses to it form an ongoing dialogue through which the moral reputations of trading women and businessmen, and cultural ideas about moral value and gender, are constructed and rethought. By combining a sociolinguistic study of talk, storytelling, and conversation with analysis of gender, the political economy of trading, and the moral economy of personhood, Pietila; reveals a new perspective on the globalization of the market economy and its meaning and impact on the local level.


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Gossip, Epistemology, and Power : Knowledge Underground
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ISBN: 3319478400 3319478397 Year: 2017 Publisher: Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan,

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This book explains how gossip contributes to knowledge. Karen Adkins marshals scholarship and case studies spanning centuries and disciplines to show that although gossip is a constant activity in human history, it has rarely been studied as a source of knowledge. People gossip for many reasons, but most often out of desire to make sense of the world while lacking access to better options for obtaining knowledge. This volume explores how, when our access to knowledge is blocked, gossip becomes a viable path to knowledge attainment, one that involves the asking of questions, the exchange of ideas, and the challenging of preconceived notions. .


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Envy, Poison, and Death : Women on Trial in Classical Athens
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ISBN: 0191068918 0198822588 Year: 2015 Publisher: Oxford Oxford University Press

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At the heart of this book are some trials conducted in Athens in the fourth century BCE. In each case, the charges involved a combination of supernatural activities, including potion-brewing and cult activity; the defendants were all women. Because of the brevity of the ancient sources, and their lack of agreement, the precise charges are unclear; the reasons for taking these women to court, even condemning some of them to die, remain mysterious. This book takes the complexity and confusion of the evidence not as a riddle to be solved, but as revealing multiple social dynamics. It explores the changing factors—material, ideological, and psychological—that may have provoked these events. It focuses in particular on the dual role of envy (phthonos) and gossip as processes by which communities identified people and activities that were dangerous, and examines how and why those local, even individual, dynamics may have come to shape official civic decisions during a time of perceived hardship. At first sight so puzzling, these trials come to provide a vivid glimpse of the sociopolitical environment of Athens during the early to mid-fourth century BCE, including responses to changes in women’s status and behaviour, and attitudes to particular supernatural/religious activities within the city. This study reveals some of the characters, events, and local social processes that shaped an emergent concept of magic: it suggests that the legal boundary of acceptable behaviour was shifting, not only within the legal arena, but also with the active involvement of society beyond the courts.


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Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood : Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism
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ISBN: 0814728480 0814728243 9780814728246 9780814728482 9780814728239 0814728235 Year: 2011 Publisher: New York, NY : New York University Press,

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Before Liz Smith and Perez Hilton became household names in the world of celebrity gossip, before Rush Limbaugh became the voice of conservatism, there was Hedda Hopper. In 1938, this 52-year-old struggling actress rose to fame and influence writing an incendiary gossip column, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” that appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers throughout Hollywood’s golden age. Often eviscerating moviemakers and stars, her column earned her a nasty reputation in the film industry while winning a legion of some 32 million fans, whose avid support established her as the voice of small-town America. Yet Hopper sought not only to build her career as a gossip columnist but also to push her agenda of staunch moral and political conservatism, using her column to argue against U.S. entry into World War II, uphold traditional views of sex and marriage, defend racist roles for African Americans, and enthusiastically support the Hollywood blacklist.While usually dismissed as an eccentric crank, Jennifer Frost argues that Hopper has had a profound and lasting influence on popular and political culture and should be viewed as a pivotal popularizer of conservatism. The first book to explore Hopper’s gossip career and the public’s response to both her column and her politics, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood illustrates how the conservative gossip maven contributed mightily to the public understanding of film, while providing a platform for women to voice political views within a traditionally masculine public realm. Jennifer Frost builds the case that, as practiced by Hopper and her readers, Hollywood gossip shaped key developments in American movies and movie culture, newspaper journalism and conservative politics, along with the culture of gossip itself, all of which continue to play out today.

Witchcraft, sorcery, rumors, and gossip
Authors: ---
ISBN: 0521808685 052100473X 1107144019 0511184220 0511165862 0511312792 0511616317 1280437316 0511163932 0511164734 9780511165863 9780511184222 9780511616310 9780511164736 9781280437311 9786610437313 6610437319 9780521004732 9780521808682 9780511163937 9781107144019 9780511312793 Year: 2004 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip combines two classic topics in social anthropology in a new synthesis: the study of witchcraft and sorcery and the study of rumours and gossip. It shows how rumour and gossip are invariably important as catalysts for accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, and demonstrates the role of rumour and gossip in the genesis of social and political violence, as in the case of both peasant rebellions and witch-hunts. Examples supporting the argument are drawn from Africa, Europe, India, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. They include discussions of witchcraft trials in Essex, England in the seventeenth century, witch-hunts and vampire narratives in colonial and contemporary Africa, millenarian movements in New Guinea, the Indian Mutiny in nineteenth-century Uttar Pradesh, and rumours of construction sacrifice in Indonesia.

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