Trolling Before the Internet

<p><b>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. </b> <p/>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. <p/>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<i> Beowulf </i> David Rudrum demonstrates that trolls' rhetorical shenanigans are neither new nor unvanquishable.</p>