ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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-