Telling People What to Think

Book excerpt: This collection of essays displays a number of different approaches to the most significant early eighteenth-century periodicals. The range is considerable: the critique of ideology and polemical strategy, the political history of the press, the rhetoric of the genre, and the material circumstances of periodical production all find a place. The periodical profoundly shaped the English reading public's ways of perceiving the social and political institutions of their own age.