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Part of
News with an Attitude: Ideological perspectives in the historical press
Edited by Claudia Claridge
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 105] 2025
► pp. 33–55

Chapter 3
Representing Ireland and the Irish in the 17th- and 18th-century English press

| University of Augsburg
The treatment of Ireland in the London press from 1640 to 1800 is investigated with the help of the ZEN and Lampeter corpora, following up on De Nie’s (2004) hypothesis that views of the Irish could have functioned as a foil for creating a British identity. Mentions of the Irish and Irish affairs matters are not only very infrequent, but also are of a nature to deny agency to the Irish. Within this picture of discursive neglect, apparently based on true English disinterest, three aspects stand out, which partly contribute to (unsystematic) othering: (i) Irish Catholicism, styled as hostile to Britain, (ii) a set of mocking stereotypes, and (iii) Ireland seen as subservient to the economic interests of England.
Keywords: national identity, stereotypes, othering, English-Irish relations, 17th-18th centuries, newspapers, pamphlets, collocation, transitivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Group identities and their uses
    • 2.1National groups in focus: The English and the Irish
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Newspapers and pamphlets
    • 3.2Corpuslinguistic approach
  • 4.Representations in the press
    • 4.1Collocational Patterns
    • 4.2Syntactic patterns
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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References (19)
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