Impolite Periodicals - (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850) by Emrys D Jones & Adam James Smith & Katarina Stenke (Paperback)

About the Book

Impolite Periodicals brings together a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century periodical publication, not simply to argue that periodicals, such as Addison and Steele's popular The Spectator, could be impolite, but to explore how readings of their potential impoliteness might affect our understanding of their literary and social significance.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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."

--Mark Schoenfield "author of British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The "Literary Lower Empire""

"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."

--Jennie Batchelor "author of The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History"

About the Author

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.