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This volume examines the determining role of context in the production and reception of news texts from the seventeenth century until the first half of the twentieth century. The context is understood as historical, social, political, professional, textual and material, with chapters focusing on how such a context or contexts influenced the language and reception of the news texts in question. The contributors to the volume are experts in their field of research and have employed a variety of methodological approaches in their analyses of the interrelationship between context and historical news discourse. These include historical pragmatics, historical discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, appraisal theory, frame theory, and corpus linguistics.
The volume is divided into three sections: British News Contexts, International News Contexts, and Advertising Contexts. The first two sections offer a wide-ranging examination of how context has determined the writing and understanding of news in both the British and international domain. The third section in the volume on advertising contexts and discourse is not just justified by the fundamental importance of advertising in the development and history of the press but also by the social and political relevance of the topics examined in the advertisements. These include studies on mental health and asylum advertisements, runaway slaves classified advertisements, and embedded nationalistic content and ideology in Irish newspaper advertisements of the 1930s.

The Role of Context in the Production and Reception of Historical News Discourse

Nicholas Brownlees: Introduction - Elisabetta Cecconi: Propaganda Discourse in Context: Pro and Anti-Strafford Pamphlets on the Eve of the English Civil War - Carla Suhr: False News in the English Press in the 1680s - Irma Taavitsainen: Scientific Book Reviews in the Seventeenth Century: Early Stages of the Genre - Hye-Joon Yoon: News as History: The Context of Edmund Burke's Historical Articles in The Annual Register (1758-1764) and their Rhetoric of Contextualisation - Claudia Claridge: Murder in the Press: Representations of Old Bailey Murder Trials in Newspapers - Turo Vartiainen/Turo Hiltunen/Minna Palander-Collin: Linguistic Contexts of Social Change: Tracing the Decline of the Master-Servant Institution in Three Corpora - Birte Bös: Contextualising British Suffrage Newspapers - Javier Díaz-Noci: From Italy to Spain: Style and Narration in the First Semi-Periodical Newspaper in Spanish - Roberta Facchinetti: Socio-Political Context and the Press in Early 20th Century China: A Case Study - Maija Stenvall: "Fears are entertained" - Constructing 'Fear' in News Agency Reports in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century - Sandra Tuna/Elsa Simoes/Jorge Pedro Sousa: 'Never let truth get in the way of a good story': The Journalistic Style of Reinaldo Ferreira (Reporter X) and William Randolph Hearst - Matylda Wlodarczyk: "Whoever will discover where he lurks": Presenting Addressees and Advertisers in Runaway Slave Classifieds - Viola Wiegand: Surveillance Contexts in 19th-century British Mental Healthcare: A Study of Adverts in The Times - Davide Mazzi: "If you want Ireland to prosper...": A Discourse-Analytic Study of Irishness in Irish Newspaper Advertising of the 1930s - Elsa Simoes: Advertising and Newspapers in Context: Dorothy L. Sayers's Murder Must Advertise (1933) - Notes on Contributors