This chapter looks at the period 1700 to 1820, one of profound change in Ireland as technological advances coupled with social and educational developments deeply influenced the intellectual and literary landscape. In the six and a half centuries since the invention of printing many new technologies affected the creation, distribution, consumption, and enjoyment of printed texts. Innovations and developments in printing, typefounding, papermaking, and marketing contributed to the advance of literary culture. The rise in education from the eighteenth century created an audience for literature in its many forms. Imaginative writing developed and attracted new audiences as literacy expanded among different cohorts. The newspaper provided the most comprehensive medium for the dissemination of information. Literacy was not necessarily a requirement as evidence shows that one newspaper could be shared among readers and read aloud to groups of listeners. Print advertising, an eighteenth-century innovation, increased the market for literary works.

This chapter examines the market for poetry during the First World War, discussing the various outlets for verse and the factors that drove its publication and consumption. While previous studies of wartime publishing tend to focus on specific national contexts, this chapter surveys the international dimensions of the poetic marketplace, with a particular focus on the publishing of poetry in Britain, France, Germany and the USA. Drawing on a range of primary sources – including contemporary periodicals and publishing records – it reveals why poems were published in a range of books, magazines, and newspapers. In doing so, it demonstrates that the profusion of wartime poetry was not only a literary phenomenon, but also one that was shaped by commercial and political forces.

Public engagement with the twin scandals associated with the railways was much more direct, as most of the victims were ordinary citizens. These individuals shared their experiences by writing eyewitness accounts of crashes, or of approaches made by speculative stags, in letters to the press. Some of the newspapers that published these letters of protest were themselves caught up in the politics of the ‘railway interest’, occasionally engaging in internecine warfare through statements written by their editors. And Sir Robert Peel, whose government was responsible for the control of the railways, was prepared to address the nation directly, if anonymously, by drafting text for a Times leading article in a letter to his chancellor of the exchequer.

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

“The Article” looks at newspaper accounts of lynching through the lens of print, visual, media, and material culture. This materialist lens draws particular attention to the production and circulation of newspaper accounts. Further, this chapter conceptualizes the broader issues of memory, absence, and narrative in the use of newspaper articles as historical primary sources.

This chapter examines another form of conventional historical source through a material culture lens by considering a letter written in 1898 by a former Fusionist supporter and the father of Emma Hartsell. Hartsell was the alleged cause of Kizer and Johnson's lynching, and her father's letter defended the lynching as a necessary corrective to his own former political beliefs. This chapter puts the letter in two broader contexts: the white supremacist political campaign of 1898, and the built environment of media in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century South. In particular, the chapter juxtaposes various landscape texts, such as notes left on lynched bodies and commerical advertising on buildings, to conceptualize broader printed and built cultures of white supremacy.

One of the primary functions of war-time print culture was to bring the home to the front and the front to the home, thereby connecting soldiers with the loved ones they had left behind and bolstering the war effort in both places. On the pages of newspapers that circulated in army camps and in northern cities and towns, the campfire and the fireside were paired emblems of the Union cause. As a hallmark of antebellum conceptions of family and home, the fireside served as inspiration for mobilization and military endeavor. In turn, the campfire—a utilitarian necessity of army life—provided a substitute fireside for the soldiers gathered around it, connecting them to distant homes and uniting them in a shared cause. As flexible symbols, the campfire and the fireside blurred racial and gendered boundaries, equating the work of women at home with the efforts of soldiers at the front and providing a place of communion for Black and white soldiers.

In this chapter, I apply the theory of the reasoning state to re-interpret the progressive era rise of the administrative state. Three forces combined to activate the concerns articulated in the theory. First, the economy became far more complex and interdependent after the Civil War, changes that both called for state intervention and also made it highly challenging for the public to effectively audit those interventions. Second, economic power and hence the ability to influence the democratic organs of government became far more unequal, further setting the ground for public distrust of policy outputs. Third, a media revolution occurred around the turn of the century. Changes in print technology and the rise of new media forms, notably the muckrakers, altered the information environment to shed light on abuses of the public trust. Together, these forces spurred (justified) distrust of the prevailing Madisonian form, and led to the rise of progressive era administrative bodies.

In one of the reviews of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, an anonymous reviewer for the Swedenborgian Christian Spiritualist conceives of Whitman’s poetry (and poetry more broadly) as aligning with a tradition of spiritual mediumship.1 The great poets, that is, possess a medial capacity to channel and develop a “spiritual intercourse” with the muse, who is herself part of the transcendent realm. Having distinguished between the “two permanent types” of media – those singular agents who are lucky enough to receive “direct influx” from the divine source of love and wisdom, and a “second class of media” that channel “individual Spirits” and “societies of Spirits” – the reviewer proceeds to outline what is happening to the idea of mediumship as society transitions into a new and disorienting phase. “Many varieties of Mediumship,” the reviewer argues, “must be expected” in this moment of social and political turmoil, and not all of them either savory or desirable. The present age now produces imitators who merely “pour forth as Divine Revelations the froth and scum of a receding age”; confidence men who give “false notions of the state of man after death”; as well as other suspect figures who merely “come in contact with the outmost portion of the Spirit-life.” Then there are those more exceptional beings, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who “receive influxes from the upper mind-sphere of the age” and “[see] the future of truths as our Spirit-seers discern the future of man.”2

Among the many, many transitions in American literature that have been attributed to the US Civil War, one of the less often noted is that the war years coincided with a decisive shift away from authorial anonymity. This transition can be observed in the publication practices of the day’s leading magazines. Harper’s, which had been started in 1850, began naming authors in the index to its twentieth volume (1860), while the Atlantic Monthly, introduced in 1857, began publishing the names of its authors in the index to its tenth volume (1862). The first series of Putnam’s, which ran in the 1850s, did not identify authors in either its issues or its volume indices, but the second series, begun in 1868, did, a distinction that holds when comparing the Continental Monthly, which ran during the war (1862–64) and never identified authors, with the Galaxy, which debuted in 1866 and always did. Even the hoary North American Review got into the act, and started attributing its authors with the January issue of 1868, after more than fifty years of never doing so. There were, of course, exceptions to this trend; antebellum periodicals like Graham’s Magazine or the Broadway Journal sometimes identified the more famous authors who contributed to their pages, while reprint journals like Littell’s Living Age (1844–96) attributed only the original publication sources of its contents, never the individual authors, even at the end of the century. In general, though, postbellum readers of American magazines would be much more likely than their antebellum forebears to know the name of the person who had written whichever article they were reading.

Newspapers as the main media of political coverage continue to be primary outlets for reports and opinions on collectively binding decisions. Following a quantitative research strategy, this chapter introduces a new methodological approach that allows us to systematically capture media attention and public salience of court decisions. It provides insight into a new dataset for newspaper coverage of more than 4,000 CJEU decisions in eight EU quality newspapers. The chapter describes the data collection process, the structure of the data, and the opportunities for quantitative analysis. Moreover, it emphasizes the general applicability of this methodological approach for a large number of court cases across a longer time period. The collected data offers new insights into media attention to CJEU cases and various opportunities for future analysis. The contribution also reflects on limitations, strengths, and weaknesses of this quantitative approach of studying the CJEU, compared to other approaches presented in the volume.

Chapter 2 provides a review of the existing literature on the representation of, and attitudes towards, mental illness in a variety of text types (e.g. online data, newspaper data, spoken data) and across a range of analytical disciplines. In addition to exploring research on the representation of mental illness in these different data types and disciplines, the theoretical position of Social Constructionism (particularly in reference to CDA) is discussed.

Chapter 9 investigates if and how the symptoms of mental illness are present in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus by exploring the symptoms of each disorder type covered by the corpus. Specifically, using keyword and key semantic domain analysis, I explore whether the symptoms of mental illnesses are accurately represented in news articles on mental illness. In addition to corpus tools, I also qualitatively analyse the most prototypical text for each illness subcorpus (i.e. the text that contains the most frequent features of the illness subcorpus overall) to explore whether the keyness findings are also a feature of whole texts.

In this chapter, I show that mental health and illness is an increasingly important topic in UK society, both in terms of the number of newspaper articles covering mental illness-related issues and the increased prevalence of mental illness generally. I also show how the public are increasingly aware of the language used to discuss mental illness in the press. Moreover, I explain how the language used to discuss mental illness is being increasingly prescribed by anti-stigma initiatives. Despite anti-stigma activities and initiatives, very little research exists that explores the language used to discuss mental illness in the press using a purely linguistic approach. For this reason, I set out the research gap in the existing literature that this book goes some way to addressing. I also introduced the MI 1984–2014 Corpus and provide an outline for the rest of this book.

In the 1820s, a stable company of Italian singers was in charge of the operatic performances staged at the Imperial Theatre in Rio de Janeiro. Working together with a French ballet troupe, those soloists joined forces to present their repertoire before a heterogeneous audience. Works by Rossini and his contemporaries were sung in the original language, subscriptions were sold for annual seasons and Italian masterpieces crowned the theatrical festivities offered to the Emperor. The chapter examines this recently independent country’s attraction for foreign singers and looks at how these artists were able to pursue their careers in a totally different milieu to that to which they had been accustomed, living in a city that offered great opportunities, but also considerable challenges to newcomers. A small group of Italian singers were employed by a local impresario, with the aim of making opera a viable cultural activity at an Imperial Court that was proud of its connections with Europe, yet they also struggled with economic difficulties and the country’s political instability. The press assumed a central role in negotiating the relationship between artists and their audiences, revealing a growing public interest in opera, its backstage and the lives of its protagonists.

Chapter 2 considers the archipelagic impact of the 1688 Revolution by examining the the War of the Two Kings in Ireland (1688–91). It analyzes how Irish events were mediated in newspapers such as the Orange Gazette and the London Gazette, both in the news stories and in advertisements for printed works such as maps, Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana (1689) and James Farewell’s The Irish Hudibras (1689). It focuses on how the media event surrounding the relief of the siege of Derry shaped English perceptions of the rest of the conflict in Ireland. The importance of Derry was amplified by the visit of George Walker to London and by thanksgiving services held in churches in London. By examining the representation of the siege in John Mitchelburne’s Ireland Preserv’d (1705), this chapter also assesses how Ireland was subsequently erased from the memory of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in Britain.

Chapter 4 examines the early mediation of the events of 1715 Rising within the context of a mediascape for news consisting of both the older form of manuscript newsletters and an increasing number of printed newspapers and periodicals. It compares reports about the developing conflict found in the manuscript newsletters sent to the Newdigate family between May 30 and September 29, 1715 with those printed in five newspapers during the same time period, suggesting that the affordances of the newspaper form both amplified the sense of discontinuity in the news about the Rising as it was unfolding and made that information available to a larger and anonymous audience. It explores the subsequent treatment of the conflict in two periodical essays published in 1715 and 1716: Richard Steele’s The Town-Talk and Joseph Addison’s The Free-Holder. It concludes by considering popular histories written in the immediate aftermath of the 1715 which reprinted information originally found in newsletters and newspapers. These histories both minimized what had been the threat of the 1715 Rising and helped to circulate Jacobite counter-memories.

Chapter 5 examines in the 1745 Jacobite Rising in the context of the expansion of the periodical press and the print marketplace in the mid-eighteenth century. Information about the events of the 1745 Rising was made available to readers in a more continuous and a more pervasive way than during the 1715 Rising. The chapter explores how this expanding circulation of information prompted greater concern not just about the trustworthiness of the genres of the newspaper and the political pamphlet but also about how citizens were consuming information. It next focuses on three genres of printed works produced after the Battle of Culloden (1746) that reworked newspaper reports into their narratives: accounts of the trials and executions of the rebels, “Chevalier” or “Pretender” narratives about the escape of Charles Edward Stuart, and popular histories. With their conscious and unconscious intertextual borrowings, these printed works, like those of the 1715 Rising, inscribe the cultural memory of the 1745 as a series of complicated knots of memory.