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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. 56–81

Chapter 4
Inducing sympathies and antipathies

A corpus-assisted analysis of letters from the 1857–1858 Indian uprisings in the press

| University of Florence
Conflicts have always been highly newsworthy. They receive massive coverage while inducing readers’ sympathies or antipathies, depending on which party in conflict they identify with. By adopting a corpus-assisted approach integrated with discourse analysis, this study focuses on how, in a small corpus of letters published in the press during the 1857–58 uprisings in India, the most frequent keywords and collocation patterns represent the events. The emerging data indicate how language is used to generate emotive reactions towards the Indian rebels in the readership, while legitimising the East India Company officials’ actions with the purpose of developing a sense of shared beliefs in an English identity across the empire by connecting personal concerns to a wider sense of public engagement.
Keywords: letters, press, uprisings, sepoys, ideology, emotivity, identity, corpus linguistics, semantic patterns, colonialism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The historical, religious, political and geographical context
  • 3.Letters and ideology in the 1857–58 British press
  • 4.Corpus and methods
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Cawnpore
    • 5.2Sepoys
    • 5.3We
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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