Impolite Periodicals: Reading for Rudeness in the Eighteenth Century

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.