Background: Twenty-first-century undergraduates often find eighteenth-century culture difficult to access and, influenced by popular assumptions about the period in current media theory, characterise the century as individualist, underestimating the cultural significance of social networking in literary and political history. Purpose: This study…

Proposes satire as a form of argumentative practice. Examines eighteenth-century satirical attacks upon London's ubiquitous debating societies (formed among tradesmen, craftsmen, professionals, and small businessmen to "improve" themselves) as evidence of satire's public role in which the ideological struggle between social classes was…