"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 century. 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?"--.

• Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Manners, norms and transgressions: Introduction
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Three waves of politeness theory
  • 3. The diachrony of manners and politeness
  • 4. Norms, blunders and transgressions
  • 5. Literary and linguistic approaches to data analysis
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Primary sources
  • Corpora and dictionaries
  • References
• ‘Ipomedon’ and the elusive nature of blunders in the courtly literature of medieval England
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The tale of Ipomedon as a succession of blunders
    • 2.1 The incident with the boteler
    • 2.2 The Proud One’s blunder
    • 2.3 Ipomedon the troublemaker
  • 3. The evolution of politeness strategies in the Middle English retellings of Fr. ‘Ipomedon’
    • 3.1 The refashioning of minor transgressions
    • 3.2 The reinvention of Ipomedon as a fallible human being ‘and’ a model of courtly values
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Sources
  • Dictionaries
  • References
• Unrestrained acting and norms of behaviour: Excess and instruction in ‘The Legend of Good Women’
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. ‘Exempla’ and the idea of good women
  • 3. The representation of despicable actions
  • 4. The legend of Thisbe
  • 5. The legend of Lucretia
  • 6. Conclusions: Unrestrained gestures as norms of behaviour
  • Sources
  • References
• Blunders and (un)intentional offence in Shakespeare
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Blunders: Pragmatic description and their effects
    • 2.1 Blunders as FTAs
    • 2.2 Blunders, intentionality and impoliteness
    • 2.3 Blunders as speech acts: Illocutionary force and unintentional perlocutionary effects
      • 2.3.1 Embarrassment and embarrassability
      • 2.3.2 Humour
  • 3. Blunders in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ and ‘King Henry IV, Parts 1’ and ‘2’
    • 3.1 Mistress Quickly
    • 3.2 Falstaff
  • 4. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Sources
  • References
• The discourse of manners and politeness in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The vocabulary of manners and politeness
  • 3. The discourse of manners and politeness
  • 4. Discussion and conclusion
  • Editions
  • Corpora and dictionaries
  • References
• “This Demon Anger”: Politeness, conversation and control in eighteenth-century conduct books for young women
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Self-control and individualism: The link with conduct
  • 3. The discourse of conduct: Readers, writers, and ideals
  • 4. Conduct books and the display of anger
  • 5. Avoiding anger
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Sources
  • References
• A medical debate of “heated pamphleteering” in the early eighteenth century
  • 1. Conflict discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
  • 2. Data, research questions and methods
  • 3. The pragmatic space of aggressive language use
  • 4. A brief history of smallpox literature
  • 5. Main protagonists and what they wrote
  • 6. Norms of medical writing in the eighteenth century
    • 6.1 Norm 1: Royal Society “plain” style
    • 6.2 Norm 2: Rhetorical eloquence
    • 6.3 Norm 3: Scholastic argumentation with moral concerns
  • 7. Exploiting the norms with meaning reversals
    • 7.1 Setting the scene
    • 7.2 From general to personal accusations
    • 7.3 Demeaning professional skills and experience
    • 7.4 Language issues
    • 7.5 Modification of a classical argumentation pattern
    • 7.6 National feelings: Us versus them
  • 8. Conclusions
  • Sources
  • References
• Transgressions as a socialisation strategy in Samuel Richardson’s ‘The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum’ (1734)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Representation of transgressive acts in Richardson’s ‘The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum’
  • 3. Instructive language in ‘The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum’
  • 4. Concluding remarks
  • Sources
  • References
• Variations from letter-writing manuals: ‘Humble petitions’ signed by women in Late Modern London
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Letter-writing and petitions in eighteenth-century England
  • 3. Letter-writing manuals in Late Modern England
    • 3.1 The instructions in these manuals
    • 3.2 Features of the petitions in the manuals
  • 4. The present study
    • 4.1 The data
    • 4.2 The manuals
  • 5. Method
  • 6. Results
    • 6.1 Group 1: Petitions that include a superscription and/or an opening formula
    • 6.2 Group 2: Petitions that do not include a superscription and/or an opening formula
  • 7. A comparison between Group 1 and Group 2
  • 8. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Sources
  • References
• Impoliteness in Blunderland: Carroll’s Alice books and the manners in which manners fail
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Victorian manners
  • 3. From politeness to impoliteness
  • 4. Transgressions in Carroll’s Alice books
    • 4.1 Linguistic transgressions
      • 4.1.1 Punning
      • 4.1.2 Neologism
      • 4.1.3 Relexicalisation
    • 4.2 Pragmatic transgressions
      • 4.2.1 Conversational maxim violations
      • 4.2.2 Infelicitous speech acts
      • 4.2.3 Bald-on-record impoliteness
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Sources
  • References
• “Collect a thousand loyalty points and you get a free coffin”: Creative impoliteness in the TV comedy drama ‘Doc Martin’
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Asymmetrical power relationships in doctor-patient interaction
  • 3. Towards an understanding of impoliteness and its comic potential
  • 4. Analysis of extracts from Series 1 to 7
    • 4.1 Series 1 (2004): Starting off on the wrong foot
    • 4.2 Series 2 (2005): People coming back
    • 4.3 Series 3 (2007): The course of true love never did run smooth
    • 4.4 Series 4 (2009): Blood’s no problem
    • 4.5 Series 5 (2011): Leaving Portwenn, or maybe not
    • 4.6 Series 7 (2015): Anglo-American relations
  • 5. Conclusions
  • Data
  • References
• “Meaning you have been known to act rashly”: How Molly Weasley negotiates her identity as a moral authority in conflicts in the ‘Harry Potter’ series
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Theoretical background
  • 3. Molly Weasley as a moral authority
  • 4. Methodology
  • 5. Findings
    • 5.1 Conventionalised impoliteness
    • 5.2 Implicational impoliteness
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Sources
  • References
• Name index
• Subject index