...Daniel Williams This essay considers the significance of rumor in the work of Thomas Hardy, anchoring its claims in a reading of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). I argue that rumor conditions the narrative movement of this novel through its linked operations in social space and bodily sensation...

... Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu, where a “lost tribe” is rumored to be living. As is typical of such discovery narratives, the affective response of wonder initially dominates the discourse. Over time, however, this sense of wonder is transformed into the more durable feeling of curiosity, which in turn...

... people had anticipated and no one understood.” This “new science” of networks, in taking on the “world of people, friendships, rumors, disease, fads, firms, and financial crises . . . speaks directly to the momentous events going on around it” (13).1 No one would deny that the world has been...

... Dedlock to parliamentary debates about social reform. There is “rumor,” which “persists in flitting and chattering about town” (690). There is also the space of the city itself, which links characters like Charley and Gridley by mere proxim- ity. And crucially, there are systems of kinship, the most...

... failing to pay attention to the rumors of forced conscriptions in the university district, he is captured by warlord soldiers and forced to work as a “coolie” laborer. Despite his meticulous bookkeeping skills, Xiangzi's quest for economic independence and urban mobility is repeatedly undermined...

... as it conducts its subordinated clauses and antimetabolic caesurae toward their murderous peroration. Foregrounding the capacity of language to induce an indecency that neither will nor can be further defined, Labouchere's own words rely on connotation and rumor, legislating neither this act nor...

... business deals in Eastern Europe and by rumors linking him to the Soviet spies Burgess and Maclean. So we should hardly be surprised to find him siding with 1960s student radicals in the final volume before meeting his death in a sordid hippie commune. It is perhaps an unnecessary turn of the screw...

... who is also an expatriate in Paris. Kate figures as doppelganger to Sarah in that she is rumored to be held captive by her own Parisian boyfriend— this captivity in effect doubling and haunting Sarah’s own abject relationship to Henri. On an occasion when Henri attacks Sarah with racist remarks...

... of the slave's voice. Because she spreads rumors about Lincoln as "illiterate" (7),and because she does not even conceive of the possibility of slaves themselves writing their own stories, she implies that she is the only appropriate scribe for this national story. A "toady to Nobility" (S), her ties...

...)—but there had been rumors that Baker had schemed to use vitriol to destroy the Tongan king.17 It is plausible that Stevenson took the essential elements of this rumor (an acid attack on an island ruler) as the source for Huish’s plot to overthrow Attwater. But to search too stubbornly for real-life...

... is reminiscent of the rumor mill in The Corner That Held Them , except that Isa's transformations of history are confined to her own creative mind. Yet these transformations are triggered by an outside stimulus, the newspaper, which pierces through Isa's mental skin. In Between the Acts , the newspaper, which...

... read each other's feelings and come to an understanding. When rumor announces that Anne will marry her cousin William Elliot, she wonders how she can convince Wentworth otherwise: "How was such jealousy to be quieted? How was the truth to reach him? How, in all the peculiar disadvantages...

... are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms” (99–100). For an interesting take on this quotation, see Daniel Williams , “Rumor, Reputation, and Sensation in Tess of the d'Urbervilles .” 26 Curiously, pregnancy and motherhood do not arise even in Kaja Silverman's...

... of January 1796 and, more seriously, in November 1798 (61). Deirdre Le Faye judiciously reports the surviving evidence, including niece Caroline’s skeptical, perhaps anxious letters about “that old story,” rumors told and retold but without substance (277–78). Becoming Jane, moreover, claims...

... in the new technologies of communication to a multibillion-dollar corporation, rumored to be the target of a buyout by Alphabet, Google, or Disney. The relationship between capitalism and the semiotics of new technologies is direct and integral. Of course, that economic dimension has always been a crucial...

..., for example, the incest rumor that plagues Philip Weatherby and Mary Pomfret. Hentea argues that the novel's plot is concerned with generational thinking and with the anxieties of heredity and inheritance ( Limits 26 ). As children, Philip and Mary are thus rehearsals of their parents. The possibility...

... arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (337). These are the closing lines of the novel, with “Shalimar”—or “Solomon”—naming both the ancestral Virginia home of the Dead family and their enslaved forebear, rumored in the community...

... credibility of one's composite estimates, of one's confidence in them, cannot be expressed in terms of relative likelihoods or events. . . . Any scrap of evidence bearing on relative likelihood should already be represented in those estimates. But having exploited knowledge, guess, rumor, assumption, advice...

..., the tyranny of the strong, which in turn gives rise to the cruelty of the weak. It is dif- ficult to say which is depicted as the more brutal place-Mungo's birthplace, where petty jealousies, rumors, and innuendoes lead to the horrific murder of an innocent man and his family, or Lord Montagu's...

..., as citizens grow increasingly frustrated. Rumors begin to circulate about whether the “unfortunate B-Mor fellow” committed suicide or was murdered by his disgraced family, as cases of violent crime and domestic abuse seem to increase overnight. On Such a Full Sea offers an empathetic parable about the ways...