Early Modern English News Discourse: Newspapers, pamphlets and scientific news discourse
Published by: englishcology (Karma: 4552.52) on 28 September 2009 | Views: 4965
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In Early Modern Britain, new publication channels were developed and new textual genres established themselves. News discourse became increasingly more important and reached wider audiences, with pamphlets as the first real mass media. Newspapers appeared, first on a weekly and then on a daily basis. And scientific news discourse in the form of letters exchanged between fellow scholars turned into academic journals. The papers in this volume provide state-of-the art analyses of these developments. The first part of the volume contains studies of early newspapers that range from reports of crime and punishment to want ads, and from traces of religious language in early newspapers to the use of imperatives. The second part is devoted to pamphlets and provides detailed analyses of news reporting and of impoliteness strategies. The last section is devoted to scientific news discourse and traces the early publication formats in their various manifestations.
Table of Contents :
Preface
vii
Newspapers, pamphlets and scientific news discourse in Early Modern Britain
Andreas H. Jucker
1–9
Newspapers
Crime and punishment
Udo Fries
13–30
Reading late eighteenth-century want ads
Laura Wright
31–55
“Alwayes in te Orbe of honest Mirth, and next to Truth”: Proto-infotainment in the Welch Mercury
Nicholas Brownlees
57–72
Religious language in early English newspapers?
Thomas Kohnen
73–89
“As silly as an Irish Teague”: Comparisons in early English news discourse
Claudia Claridge
91–114
“Place yer bets” and “Let us hope”: Imperatives and their pragmatic functions in news reports
Birte Bös
115–133
Pamphlets
Comparing seventeenth-century news broadsides and occasional news pamphlets: Interrelatedness in news reporting
Elisabetta Cecconi
137–157
“From you, my Lord, professions are but words – they are so much bait for fools to catch at”: Impoliteness strategies in the 1797–1800 Act of Union pamphlet debate
Alessandra Levorato
159–185
Scientific news discourse
“Joyful News out of the Newfound World”: Medical and scientific news reports in Early Modern England
Irma Taavitsainen
189–204
News filtering processes in the Philosophical Transactions
