Impolite Periodicals: Reading for Rudeness in the Eighteenth Century (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850)

ISBN 10: 1684485762 / ISBN 13: 9781684485765

Published by Bucknell University Press, 2026

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781684485765

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Impolite Periodicals: Reading for Rudeness in the Eighteenth Century (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850)
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1684485762
• ISBN 13: 9781684485765
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

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.

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.