Trolling Before the Internet
An Offline History of Insult, Provocation, and Public Humiliation in the Literary Classics
- 320 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Trolling Before the Internet
An Offline History of Insult, Provocation, and Public Humiliation in the Literary Classics
About this book
Trolling began long before the internet. This accessible history traces the ancestry of its textual and rhetorical strategies, by looking at literature from ancient Greece to the 1980s. Trolling is the most controversial genre of writing to have risen to prominence in the 21st century, with far-reaching consequences for its writers and readers alike. But it is too often regarded as a technological problem, confined to the internet. This book takes a very different approach: it regards trolling as a cultural problem with a long and venerable literary history. Taking in the contrarianism of Lord Byron, the wit of Oscar Wilde, insult trading in Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift's disaster trolling, Martin Luther's dissemination of heresy through a public discussion forum, the grotesquely misogynistic abuse hurled in Archilochus's poetry, the taunting provocations of avant-garde manifestos, and not forgetting public humiliations in Beowulf, David Rudrum demonstrates that trolls' rhetorical shenanigans are neither new nor unvanquishable.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Halftitle Page
- Dedication Page
- Title Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prefatory note on content
- Introduction: Trolling in/and/as literature
- 1 Trolling is … Trolling and its definitions: What we (don’t) know so far
- 2 … to defame, insult, or humiliate an opponent in public … From flyting to flaming; from Beowulf to Shakespeare
- 3 … or to make a public statement … Trolling the pope: Martin Luther goes viral
- 4 … of views that are not sincerely held … U Can Has Babeez! – Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal
- 5 … but instead aim to court controversy … Oscar Wilde as a contrarian troll, or, How to put the ‘wit’ into ‘Twitter’
- 6 … or to be provocative or vexatious … ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’: Some avant-garde troll
- 7 … sometimes with legal consequences Social justice trolling: Émile Zola’s J’Accuse...!
- Conclusions
- Index
- Imprint