Full Description
Studies of the eighteenth-century periodical have long tended to understand the form according to the period's own insistence on adhering to and promoting politeness. In contrast, this collection reads for impoliteness, revealing a more nuanced, granular, and dynamic view of eighteenth-century periodicals such as Addison and Steele's popular The Spectator, and a fuller sense of their value within the societies that produced and consumed them. By inverting the traditional focus, this volume promotes a new history of the periodical characterized not as highbrow gatekeeper of literary taste, but as incongruent, idiosyncratic, and impolite. Impolite Periodicals thus brings together a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century periodical publication, not simply to argue that periodicals could be impolite, but to explore how readings of their potential impoliteness might affect our understanding of their literary and social significance. This collection relishes and lingers on signs of rudeness, inconsistency, impurity, and failure.
With an afterword by Manushag N. Powell.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Contents
Editors' Note vii
Introduction 1
PART ONE: Polite Agendas
1 Situating Civility: Shaftesbury, Reformist Ridicule, and the Case of the Several Tatlers 17
2 Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and [Im]politeness After The Spectator 33
3 Polite Impostures: Addison's Orientalist Spectators 49
PART TWO: Impolite Spaces
4 "A Little Chasm in Conversation": Politeness and Faction in Political Periodicals of the 1730s 71
5 Originality, Obligation, and Offense in The British Magazine, 1746-1751 86
6 "The Witty Wink, and He! He! He!": Impolite Poetry in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Newspaper 101
PART THREE: Impolite Discourses
7 Conscience Is a Pair of Breeches: Terrae Filius Periodicals, 1707-1763 117
8 "A Time When Banter Ought to Cease": Roasting, Jesting, and Bantering Readers 130
9 "The World Is One Undistinguished Wild": James Boswell and the Hypochondriack Self 143
PART FOUR: Impolite Legacies
10 The Polished Read and Impolite Waste of The Spectator 161
11 Addison's Errors 180
Afterword 194
Acknowledgments 199
Bibliography 201
Notes on Contributors 215
Index 000
