Nicholas Brownlees - Böcker

A definitive account of newspaper and periodical press history across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales covering 1650 to the present dayAt various points over the last 400 years, key political, economic and social processes, have worked to hinder or promote the expansion and dissemination of information across Britain and Ireland via newspapers and periodicals. In a contemporary era characterized by debate on the limits of devolution and the potential of independence we need to assess the roles played by newspapers and periodicals in enabling national and regional identities to emerge, cohere and diversify over time. How can we best identify the most significant of these processes? What were the critical flashpoints in their development? How have they marked the place of the press in civic society? What are the consequences in considering these within the general history of the British and Irish press? This three-volume prestige project addresses these matters, offering a definitive account of newspaper and periodical press activity across Britain and Ireland between 1650 to the present day and addressing questions related to four key research interests: general social/ political history; newspaper and periodical history; cultural history; and technological history.

Consisting of twenty-eight chapters and numerous case studies the volume examines the history of the British and Irish press from its seventeenth-century beginnings up until the end of the eighteenth century. Five core chapters regard the Business of the Press (including advertising), Production and Distribution, Legal Constraints and Opportunities, Readers and Readerships, and the Emerging Identities and Communities of news writers and journalists. Other contributions focus on particular national realities such as those in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The contributions examine features relating to the production, transmission and reception of not just news publications but also the more specialised press such as periodical essays, women's periodicals, literary and review journalism, medical journals, and the criminal and religious press. As much early modern news was a transnational phenomenon the volume includes studies on European and trans-Atlantic networks as well as the role of translation in news transmission and output.

This book examines how translation and other forms of intertextual exchange have contributed to the telling of British and international print and manuscript news. In its focus on the press from the seventeenth century until the 1960s, this contributed volume enhances our understanding of both the historical role and use of translation, as well as the interplay of reporting strategies of the same news topic in different domains, languages and geographical settings. The focus on translation and intertextuality reflects the need to understand historical news as a transnational, translingual, inter-genre phenomenon in which news writers and editors were constantly seeking out and adapting both the contents and language of other texts and publications for their own journalistic purposes. Its contributors cover manuscript news and Italian avvisi, print newssheets, propaganda pamphlets and state-run newspapers, dailies, weeklies, magazines, and the specialised press, in settings that bring new insights to the transnational and comparative histories of both British and international news domains.

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.