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Troll and Goblin set out to find the rudest child and have him or her for dinner.

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature explores the early modern interest in conversation as a newly identified art. Conversation was widely accepted to have been inspired by the republican philosopher Cicero. Recognizing his influence on courtesy literature - the main source for 'civil conversation' - Jennifer Richards uncovers alternative ways of thinking about humanism as a project of linguistic and social reform. She argues that humanists explored styles of conversation to reform the manner of association between male associates; teachers and students, buyers and sellers, and settlers and colonial others. They reconsidered the meaning of 'honesty' in social interchange in an attempt to represent the tension between self-interest and social duty. Richards explores the interest in civil conversation among mid-Tudor humanists, John Cheke, Thomas Smith and Roger Ascham, as well as their self-styled successors, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser.

In Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness, Jenny Davidson considers the arguments that define hypocrisy as a moral and political virtue in its own right. She shows that these were arguments that thrived in the medium of eighteenth-century Britain's culture of politeness. In the debate about the balance between truthfulness and politeness, Davidson argues that eighteenth-century writers from Locke to Austen come down firmly on the side of politeness. This is the case even when it is associated with dissimulation or hypocrisy. These writers argue that the open profession of vice is far more dangerous for society than even the most glaring discrepancies between what people say in public and what they do in private. This book explores what happens when controversial arguments in favour of hypocrisy enter the mainstream, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between hypocrisy and more obviously attractive qualities like modesty, self-control and tact.

This volume traces the multifaceted concept of manners in the history of English from the late medieval through the early and late modern periods right up to the present day. It focuses in particular on transgressions of manners and norms of behaviour as an analytical tool to shed light on the discourse of polite conduct and styles of writing. The papers collected in this volume adopt both literary and linguistic perspectives. The fictional sources range from medieval romances and Shakespearean plays to eighteenth-century drama, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and present-day television comedy drama. The non-fictional data includes conduct books, medical debates and petitions written by lower class women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contributions focus in particular on the following questions: What are the social and political ideologies behind rules of etiquette and norms of interaction, and what can we learn from blunders and other transgressions?

Grobianus et Grobiana, a little-known but key Renaissance text, is the starting point for this examination of indecency, conduct, and subject formation in the early modern period. First published in 1549, Friedrich Dedekind's ironic poem recommends the most disgusting behavior-indecency-as a means of instilling decency. The poem, Barbara Correll maintains, not only supplements prior conduct literature but offers a reading of it as well; her analysis of the Grobianus texts (the neo-Latin original, the German vernacular adaptation, the 1605 English translation, and Thomas Dekker'sGuls Horne-booke) also provides a historical account of conduct during the shift from a medieval to a Renaissance sensibility. According to Correll, the effect of Dedekind's text is to establish normative masculine identity through the labor of aversion. The gross, material body must be subjugated and reconstituted in order to attain its status as the bearer of civil manhood. Correll shows how the virtual subject of civil conduct emerges in dominant yet necessarily beleaguered relation to colonized Others, whether in feminine, animal, or peasant guise. Referring to Renaissance courtesy literature from Castiglione to Erasmus, she identifies this double drama of early modern subject formation as central to conduct books as well as to their grobian extensions. Her work places Grobianus in the civilizing process that marked emerging bourgeois society in early modern Europe. Grobianus et Grobiana, a little-known but key Renaissance text, is the starting point for this examination of indecency, conduct, and subject formation in the early modern period. First published in 1549, Friedrich Dedekind's ironic poem recommends the most disgusting behavior-indecency-as a means of instilling decency. The poem, Barbara Correll maintains, not only supplements prior conduct literature but offers a reading of it as well; her analysis of the Grobianus texts (the neo-Latin original, the German vernacular adaptation, the 1605 English translation, and Thomas Dekker'sGuls Horne-booke) also provides a historical account of conduct during the shift from a medieval to a Renaissance sensibility. According to Correll, the effect of Dedekind's text is to establish normative masculine identity through the labor of aversion. The gross, material body must be subjugated and reconstituted in order to attain its status as the bearer of civil manhood. Correll shows how the virtual subject of civil conduct emerges in dominant yet necessarily beleaguered relation to colonized Others, whether in feminine, animal, or peasant guise. Referring to Renaissance courtesy literature from Castiglione to Erasmus, she identifies this double drama of early modern subject formation as central to conduct books as well as to their grobian extensions. Her work places Grobianus in the civilizing process that marked emerging bourgeois society in early modern Europe.

InCourtesy Lost, Kristina M. Olson analyses the literary impact of the social, political, and economic transformations of the fourteenth century through an exploration of Dante's literary and political influence on Boccaccio.

Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of CourtlinessPeter DeSa Wiggins The influence of The Book of the Courtier on the work of John Donne. John Donne has been described as a \"poet of ambition,\" who used his poems as agents in his quest for preferment among the elites of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. Until now the extent of the influence on Donne's work of that era's most influential court text -- Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier -- has never been fully explored. Courtier was Elizabethan England's approved repository of the complex social codes that governed the behavior of those desiring advancement at Court. In these revelatory readings of some of Donne's best-known poems, Peter DeSa Wiggins demonstrates that this book fired Donne's imagination and that, in his secular poetry, Donne applies, adapts, and unfolds to its fullest potential the persona of the courtier. In poems such as \"The Canonization,\" \"A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day,\" \"Aire and Angels,\" \"The Flea,\" and \"The Exstasie,\" Donne confronts his elite readers with the most exacting standard of aristocratic conduct while presenting his qualifications for sensitive government posts. By substituting social codes for poetic convention as the formative principle of his art, Donne assumed the voice of a powerful aristocracy, turned it to his advantage, built one political career out of it (which he lost), then built another, and in the process revolutionized his art form. Peter DeSa Wiggins is Professor of English at The College of William and Mary and author of Figures in Ariosto's Tapestry: Character and Design in the Orlando Furioso. ContentsIntroductionThe Satirical Art of the Disabused The Art of Impasse The English Secretary Poets and Lawyers The Future of an Illusion The Looking GlassAesthetic Play Courtly Art \"On his Mistris\" Modern Instances Courtly ComedySprezzatura or Transcendence: From Travesty to Palinode Travesty A Lesson in Deportment PalinodeDiscerning Insincerity The Good Courtier The Bad Courtier Sincerity Then and NowConclusion.