Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Thomas Leonard-Roy explores the writings of six canonical authors--Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, and Lord Byron--to illuminate the ways in which hatred became a particularly vital and animating emotion in eighteenth-century literature, partly as a result of the burgeoning print market of the period.

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.