Arguing for the importance of wit beyond its use as a literary device, Roger D. Lund outlines the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He traces its unpredictable effects in works of philosophy, religious pamphlets, and legal writing and examines what happens when literary wit is deliberately used to undermine the judgment of individuals and to destabilize established institutions of church and state. Beginning with a discussion of wit's association with deception, Lund suggests that suspicion of wit and the imagination emerges in attacks on the Restoration stage, in the persecution of The Craftsman, and in criticism directed at Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and works by writers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Woolston, and Thomas Paine. Anxieties about wit, Lund shows, were in part responsible for attempts to suppress new communal venues such as coffee houses and clubs and for the Church's condemnation of the seditious pamphlets made possible by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Finally, the establishment's conviction that wit, ridicule, satire, and innuendo are subversive rhetorical forms is glaringly at play in attempts to use libel trials to translate the fear of wit as a metaphorical transgression of public decorum into an actual violation of the civil code.

When late seventeenth-century readers wanted to inform themselves about happenings at the centres of power and fashion they had no newspapers or gossip columns to fall back on. Instead they turned to lampoons - frank, malicious, and often highly indecent accounts in verse of the real or fabricated goings on of the court and ruling elite. Harold Love presents the first comprehensive account of the thousands of lampoons and more serious `state poems' that survive from RestorationEngland and their impact on the life of the nation and the literary practice of satire.

The collapse of the supposedly ‘civilized’ German nation into the ‘barbarism’ of Hitler’s Third Reich has cast a long shadow over interpretations of German culture and society. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, a deep concern with the distinctiveness of ‘the Germans’ is linked with an ambitious attempt to work out more general relations between broad historical processes – patterns of state formation, changing social structures – and the character of the individual self, as evidenced in changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment. In critical engagement with Elias’s notion of the ‘civilizing process’, the essays collected here explore moments of excess and transgression, moments when the very boundaries of ‘civilization’ are both constructed and challenged. Inter-disciplinary contributions – on topics ranging from medieval laughter, cursing and swearing, through to music, the bourgeois self, and aspects of modern violence – highlight the complexity of inter-relations between the individual imagination and creativity, on the one hand, and the brute facts of political power and social structural inequalities, on the other; and develop new insights into the changing patterns of culture and society in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present.