Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Regular price
€93.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
Category=DSB
Category=DSK
Category=FBC
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_classics
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780198980469
- Weight: 492g
- Dimensions: 160 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 02 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The eighteenth century was the great age of hate-writing and hate-reading. Hatred, contempt, resentment, and disdain were immensely generative feelings for authors in Britain, written into not only malicious satires and belligerent pamphlets but also novels, biographies, letters, journals, and the margins and flyleaves of books. Writerly Hate restores the animosities of major authors from across the century--Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Horace Walpole, and Frances Burney--and shows how hatred and its sister feelings were creative forces in a thriving print market and combative literary culture.
There was no shortage of invective and abuse in eighteenth-century writing. But authors also hated in a rich variety of other styles: half-joking prejudice, withering criticism, confessional self-hate, haughty 'indifference and contempt', resentful doublespeak. Hate could be harsh and jarring, but it could also be subtle, refined, and dazzling. One does not have to look far to find warnings about hate's harmfulness, but the feeling could also be good in the way it staked out moral principles, condemned cruelty and sin, gave pleasure, and entertained loved ones. Hate vitalized eighteenth-century literary culture, and later helped shape the field of eighteenth-century studies.
Thomas Leonard-Roy studied literature at the University of Toronto (BA, MA) and Harvard University (PhD).
