Trolling Before the Internet: An Offline History of Insult, Provocation, and Public Humiliation in the Literary Classics
by: David Rudrum (Author)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication Date: 2024-11-14
Language: English
Print Length: 318 pages
ISBN-10: 1501391526
ISBN-13: 9781501391521
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
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.
