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

Nicholas Brownlees

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 and affected the writing and understanding of news in both the British and international domain. The third section in the volume on advertising contexts 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 eleven chapters in the two sections on British News Contexts and International News Contexts focus primarily on newspapers and periodical pamphlets but also include studies on occasional news publications, an annual review and the recontextualisation in newspapers of news agency reports.

Elisabetta Cecconi introduces the section on British News contexts with a study on the role of context in the shaping of propaganda discourse in 1641 on the eve of the English Civil War. In particular, she examines the ideologically-charged pamphlets reporting the controversial trial and execution of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. Adopting a socio-philological approach to the analysis of the pamphlets (see Archer/Culpeper 2011), Cecconi shows how the methodological constructs of this specific area of historical pragmatics lets us see how the political and judicial context, together with the genre conventions of pamphlet publishing of the time, influenced the production and reception of the pamphlets in question.

In her chapter on early scientific book reviews Irma Taavitsainen considers how the modern book review genre is an outcome of a long process that began with seventeenth-century newspapers and the first scientific journal in Britain, The Philosophical Transactions (1665-present day). The chapter sets and analyses the book reviews within their socio-historical and cultural context starting with their first appearance in the latter half of the seventeenth century. The historical pragmatics approach that Taavitsainen adopts takes as its starting point the analysis of authentic language use with a focus on communication in negotiating context-dependent meanings (Taavitsainen/ Fitzmaurice 2007: 13).

Moving forward to the eighteenth-century, Hye-Joon Yoon examines the manner in which Edmund Burke, the first editor of The Annual Register, employs forms of contextualisation and recontextualisation to report and explain the Seven Years War (1756–1763). The recontextualisation is seen in the way Burke reconfigures for the purposes of his annual publication both source and secondary materials previously published elsewhere during the previous year while the contextualisation emerges in the very particular rhetoric the renowned political thinker and essayist adopts in his impartial and informed synthesis of the war.

The group of studies on nineteenth-century news begins with Claudia Claridge’s investigation into crimes in the late modern period and how they were covered by both the semi-authoritative Old Bailey Proceedings and contemporary newspapers. As the Proceedings and press had a very different context with regard to purpose, audience and genre, the chapter investigates the degree to which newspapers differed from the former in their reporting of the individual crimes and their participants. In this analysis, consideration is also given to whether the popular newspapers included in the newspaper corpus contain features of popularisation such as a greater focus on personalisation.

Birte Bös also examines an important feature of the democratisation process in her investigation of a specialised corpus of London suffrage newspapers between 1894 and 1914. Drawing upon the concept of a multi-layered construct of context, she examines how suffrage periodicals were shaped by – but also shaped – a complex system of contexts. The dataset of 12 newspapers is studied and evaluated in relation to their macrosocial and situational contexts, intertextuality and interdiscursivity, as well as text-focussed dimensions including compositional organisation and editorial framing devices (see Tyrkkö/Räikkönen 2020, Wolf 2006). The investigation demonstrates that although diverse with regard to their final objectives and style the suffrage newspapers nevertheless have many shared practices which position them as representatives of alternative media. At a social and political level the emergence and positive reception of the publications provides evidence of how women had gained important access to the public sphere, both in the media and on the street.

Roberta Facchinetti focuses on political collusion and manipulation in the selection and writing up of news in the North China Daily News, the most important English-language newspaper published in China in the early twentieth century. In the examination of a particularly significant event in Shanghai in 1925 – the ‘May Thirtieth Incident, 1925’ – a critical discourse analysis perspective is employed (Fairclough 1995). By means of this Facchinetti examines the interaction between producer, text and consumer in relation to the news coverage in the North China Daily News of major protests in Shanghai involving Chinese inhabitants and the local police. The study considers the reception of the news through reference to some of the readers’ letters to the editor of the newspaper.

Maija Stenvall investigates the manner in which the notion of fear was constructed in British and American news agency reports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author’s study draws upon the appraisal framework developed by Martin and White (2005), and in particular on the concept of Affect, to assess the use of the search words ‘fear’ and ‘panic’ in a corpus taken from Reuters and Associated Press news dispatches reported in the New York Times, Washington Post, Observer and Manchester Guardian. The usage of ‘fear’ and ‘panic’ is frequently related to the underlying tension in contemporary international settings and situations including the Ottoman Empire and fears of the oppressed Armenians, the Spanish-American war of 1898, and the ever growing rivalry between the European great powers.

Matylda Włodarczyk’s chapter on runaway slave classified advertisements opens the section on Advertising Contexts. Focusing on a dataset of over 6,000 missing slave classifieds from Britain, two North American states (Virginia and Maryland) and the British West Indies (Jamaica and Bahamas), the study identifies and evaluates the textual moves (see Mäkinen (2008)) and person reference in relation to the immediate situational context of the announcements. The study not only examines the moves involved in the presentation of the information regarding the slave but also those cases where the encoder presumed the announcement could be read by the person in question. This latter detail emerges in those ads where the slave is addressed directly. Given the different geographical contexts of the advertisements, Włodarczyk also examines the extent to which linguistically the colonial classifieds differed from the British models.