{"product_id":"9781501391521","title":"Trolling Before the Internet: An Offline History of Insult, Provocation, and Public Humiliation in the Literary Classics","description":"\u003cb\u003eTrolling 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. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTrolling 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTaking 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\u003ci\u003e Beowulf,\u003c\/i\u003e David Rudrum demonstrates that trolls' rhetorical shenanigans are neither new nor unvanquishable.","brand":"Bloomsbury Academic","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46337963491569,"sku":"9781501391521","price":90.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0674\/5433\/7265\/files\/9781501391521_p0.jpg?v=1765115739","url":"https:\/\/shop.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781501391521","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble","version":"1.0","type":"link"}