Impolite Periodicals: Reading for Rudeness in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Emrys D. Jones, Adam James Smith, and Katarina Stenke
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. Read more.
Jane Austen has more readers today than at any time in history. Many of Austen’s legions of fans, however, came to her novels after first seeing films or other adaptations made for twenty-first century audiences. Austen herself conversely spent her literary career undermining romantic clichés and rethinking novel conventions. Confident that she and her contemporaries shared a common reading culture, Austen deliberately constructed her novels to set readerly expectations, only to disrupt or confound those expectations by challenging her readers’ assumptions and values. Read more.
The contributors to volume 31 join with Enlightenment thinkers in charting the outposts of long eighteenth-century culture while discovering new features in seemingly familiar terrain. Essays explore outlandish but often observed activities such as medical quackery, Rosicrucian hermeticism, and the oral antics associated with the twisted “Malaprop” tradition. Read more
This philosophical study of Latin American noir fiction poses the question: what if precarity and uncertainty aren’t just themes of the genre, but ways of being in the world? Emerging from a region immersed in violence, trauma, and political instability, the novela negra reveals not just disillusionment but a desire to adapt to, even dwell within, chaos. Read more
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