Pamphleteering: Polemic, Print, and the Infrastructure of Political Agency

The 'Pamphlet Wars' of the seventeenth century, the activist texts of the Labour Movement, and the recent campaigns for climate justice have all drawn on the affordances of pamphleteering to advance their cause: pamphlets circulate across geographical boundaries and social divides, they attract a readership that is usually excluded from the classical public sphere, they can be produced at low cost, and they often provide anonymity to their authors. This Element provides a brief history of short-form polemical literature from the Reformation to the present. It argues that popular dissent and popular political agency must be understood in light of the material and, more recently, digital history of polemical literature. It makes the case that current online polemic is best understood as a late infrastructural transformation of classical and modern pamphleteering. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.