Impolite Periodicals

Reading for Rudeness in the Eighteenth Century

Emrys D. Jones and Adam James Smith and Katarina Stenke (Eds.)

2025
234 pages
$49.95
ISBN 9781684485765
Transits

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.

Order here

Reviews
"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

"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"

About the editors:

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.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150, 9781684485772; EPUB: $49.95, 9781684485789