Event date:

Prof. Dr. Nicholas Brownlees - British news discourse 1620-2020: Creating credibility and learning to tell a story (07.06.2023)

The Department of the History of the English Language invites you to a lecture by

Prof. Dr. Nicholas Brownlees

(University of Florence)

on

British News Discourse 1620-2020: Creating Credibility And Learning To Tell A Story

to be held on June 7th 2023 at 11.30 a.m. CET in Aula Heliodori.

Everyone interested in (historical) news discourse is welcome!

Abstract: Right from the beginning of the British periodical press in the 1620s, news writers have faced two essential discourse issues: how do you make your news credible and what kind of narrative structure should be used to tell the news. In my presentation I shall examine (with activities) how news writers, both past and present, have employed narrative structures and truth-authenticating strategies to inform, persuade and more recently entertain.

Nicholas Brownlees is Professor of English Language at the University of Florence, Italy. He is the co-compiler of the Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus (FEEN) and has written extensively on news discourse in the early modern era. He is the author of The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth Century England (2014, 2nd edition), co-author of News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis (2015, 2nd edition), and editor of News Discourse in Early Modern Britain (2006) and The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, vol. 1 1640-1800 (2023). He is founder and Board Member of the series of international conferences on Historical News Discourse (CHINED).

Nicholas Brownlees' is UAM Excellence Visiting Professor in 2023.

The lecture handout