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.
“This excellent book productively agitates traditional thinking about periodicals in the first half of the eighteenth century. Alive to the multiple cultural, commercial, and political stakes of politeness and impoliteness, it allows us to take eighteenth-century periodicals on their own terms, in all their vitality and messiness.”
“Delving the attractions and rhetorical potentials of impoliteness, this volume exposes the pleasures and anxieties polite periodicals found in their more unruly impulses, revealing the impolite instincts undergirding polite agendas, the impolite spaces pressuring authorship, and the discourteous discourses and legacies that upend soothing narratives of civility.”
Editors’ Note vii Introduction 1 Emrys D. Jones, Adam James Smith, Katarina Stenke PA R T O N E : Polite Agendas 1 Situating Civility: Shaftesbury, Reformist Ridicule, and the Case of the Several Tatlers 17 Anthony Pollock 2 Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and [Im]politeness After The Spectator 33 Adam James Smith 3 Polite Impostures: Addison’s Orientalist Spectators 49 Katarina Stenke PA R T TWO : Impolite Spaces 4 “A Little Chasm in Conversation”: Politeness and Faction in Political Periodicals of the 1730s 71 Emrys D. Jones 5 Originality, Obligation, and Offense in The British Magazine, 1746–1751 86 Jennifer Batt
6 “The Witty Wink, and He! He! He!”: Impolite Poetry in the Late-Eighteenth- Century Newspaper 101 Claire Knowles PA R T T H R E E : Impolite Discourses 7 Conscience Is a Pair of Breeches: Terrae Filius Periodicals, 1707–1763 117 Richard Squibbs 8 “A Time When Banter Ought to Cease”: Roasting, Jesting, and Bantering Readers 130 Jennifer Buckley 9 “The World Is One Undistinguished Wild”: James Boswell and the Hypochondriack Self 143 Laura Davies PA R T FO U R : Impolite Legacies 10 The Polished Read and Impolite Waste of The Spectator 161 Amélie Junqua 11 Addison’s Errors 180 Charlotte Roberts Afterword 194 Manushag N. Powell Acknowledgments 199 Bibliography 201 Notes on Contributors 215 Index 000 569-
EMRYS D. JONES is a senior lecturer in eighteenth-century literature and culture at King's College London.
ADAM JAMES SMITH is a senior lecturer in eighteenth-century literature at York St. John University in the United Kingdom.
KATARINA STENKE is a lecturer in eighteenth-century literature at the University of Greenwich in London.
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