Propaganda Discourse in Context: Pro and Anti-Strafford Pamphlets on the Eve of the English Civil War

My paper takes as its focus the role of context in shaping the propaganda discourse of adversarial news publications on the Eve of the English Civil War. In particular, I examine a group of politically opinionated pamphlets which reported on the controversial trial and execution of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. Pro and anti-Strafford pamphlets proliferated during the trial and after the execution and became one of the most effective vehicles of political propaganda. Their successful production and reception were remarkably affected by the socio-political context in which they originated as well as by the genre conventions which consumers expected to find in the commodity and which pamphleteers strategically replicated. In order to describe and trace the link existing between contexts and language usage, I benefit from the aid of corpus linguistics techniques, combining a quantitative and a qualitative investigation of the text. Differences in keywords and concordances between Pro and anti-Strafford pamphlets reveal the choice of opposing representational frameworks within the textual possibilities that the genre allows as well as within the propaganda aims that the socio-political context dictates.