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Article published In:
Historical Pragmatics today: Articles in honour of Andreas H. Jucker
Edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Jonathan Culpeper
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2] 2021
► pp. 245–262

Medical book reviews 1665–1800

From compliments to insults

| University of Helsinki

This article traces medical book reviews up to 1800 in the first scientific periodical, The Philosophical Transactions (pt 1665–), and the first general magazine, The Gentleman’s Magazine (gm 1665–1922), within the frame of genre theory, focusing on polite and impolite speech acts. pt readers formed a close network of Royal Society members, while gm attracted a large and more heterogeneous readership. The method employed is qualitative discourse analysis in its sociohistorical context.

Two different lines of development emerge. The first issue of pt contains a book review that set a model genre script by surveying the contents and providing a concise positive evaluation at the end. gm published few book reviews at first but their number increased towards 1800. pt keeps to the positive end of evaluation with discreet criticism, while gm speech acts range from praising compliments to aggressive insults. The former trend goes back to book advertisements and the latter to scientific disputes; but in general, polite society conventions prevail in both publications.

Keywords: genre, negotiation of meaning, politeness versus impoliteness, Polite Society, speech acts
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background and method of assessment
  • 3.Book reviews: Analyses of the genre
    • 3.1The first scientific journal (pt)
    • 3.2Book reviews in Polite Society magazine (gm)
    • 3.3 gm in the 1790s: From creating harmony to verbal aggression
  • 4.Comparing pt and gm book reviews
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00055.taa
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