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.
Editors’ Note
Introduction
Emrys D. Jones, Adam James Smith, Katarina Stenke
Section 1: Polite Agendas
Chapter 1. Situating Civility: Shaftesbury, Reformist Ridicule, and The Case of the Several Tatlers
Anthony Pollock
Chapter 2. Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and [Im]politeness after The Spectator
Adam James Smith
Chapter 3. Polite Impostures: Addison’s Orientalist Spectators
Katarina Stenke
Section 2: Impolite Spaces
Chapter 4. “A Little Chasm in Conversation”: Politeness and Faction in Political Periodicals of the 1730s
Emrys D. Jones
Chapter 5. Originality, Obligation, and Offense in the British Magazine, 1746–1751
Jennifer Batt
Chapter 6. “The Witty Wink, and he! he! he!”: Impolite Poetry in the Eighteenth-Century Newspaper
Claire Knowles
Section 3: Impolite Discourses
Chapter 7. Conscience is a Pair of Breeches: Terrae Filius Periodicals, 1707–1763
Richard Squibbs
Chapter 8. “A Time when Banter Ought to Cease”: Roasting, Jesting, and Bantering Readers
Jennifer Buckley
Chapter 9. “The World is one Undistinguished Wild”: James Boswell and the Hypochondriack Self
Laura Davies
Section 4: Impolite Legacies
Chapter 10. The Polished Read and Impolite Waste of The Spectator
AmÉlie Junqua
Chapter 11. Addison’s Errors
Charlotte Roberts
Afterword
Manushag Powell
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
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