News as Texts: shaping public discourse across modern Europe

The project will address the various genres and forms of textuality—newsletters, pamphlets, dictionaries of arts and sciences, popularizing books and similia—that shaped public discourse in modern Europe, moving from a textual perspective (philological and literary studies, historical linguistics and pragmatics, and historical discourse analysis). Aiming to retrace the process that led to the progressive development and self-sufficiency of this wide textual typology, the research will pursue four interrelated strands: 1) mapping the flows of news/information/knowledge across Spain, England (colonies included) and Italy; 2) providing editions of a selection of key Spanish and English texts involved in such flows; 3) analyzing the rhetorical and pragmaticdiscursive strategies at work in compiling, narrating, manipulating, domesticating, legitimizing news/information/knowledge (with reference also to re-writing and translating); 4) discussing how these texts engage in an intertextual and interdiscursive dialogue with literary or scientific works. By applying the critical tools usually reserved to more traditionally literary forms of writing and thanks to the cooperation with national and international scholars, the project will a) cast light on forgotten or little known works, which are nevertheless worthy of attention; b) provide an innovative methodological model by integrating different disciplinary approaches (philological-linguistic, rhetorical-literary, socio-historical) in a common framework; c) foster a new and fruitful dialogue among complementary disciplinary perspectives that will be brought to bear on the study of the form, history and circulation of specific information clusters, and on their bidirectional relationships with different textual typologies and genres. By opting for OA digital publications, the project aims at a wide and free dissemination of the research outcomes, which will reach a larger public while guaranteeing sustainable development.