This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to… read more
Edited by Matti Peikola, Janne Skaffari and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen
The history of English writing is, to a considerable extent, the history of instructional writing in English. This volume is the first collection of papers to focus on instructional writing throughout the history of the language. Spanning a millennium of English texts, the materials studied… read more
Edited by Janne Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen and Brita Wårvik
This volume presents a variety of pragmatic and discourse analytical approaches to a wide range of linguistic data and historical texts, including data from English, French, Irish, Latin, and Spanish. This diversity of research questions and methods is a feature of the field of historical… read more
In this paper, we examine information-organising graphic devices such as tables and diagrams in Middle English manuscripts. Our focus is on text producers’ metadiscourse describing these devices and instructing the reader in their use. We also pay attention to the visual and spatial relationship… read more
Title pages may be viewed as early forms of advertisement, intended to make the potential reader purchase the book and attach a high value to its contents. In research into the consumer psychology of present-day advertisements, second-person pronouns have been found an effective means of… read more
This study traces the development of promotional conventions on English title-pages up to 1550. The early development of title-pages was influenced by older paratextual elements such as prologues and colophons. However, in the context of print production, book producers soon began to use this… read more
The present paper underscores the importance of examining the original manuscripts and their context(s) of production, with specific reference to the wealth of documentary material produced in connection with the Salem witchcraft outbreak of 1692. The background to this study is an international… read more
