Dialogues of the dead: Social identity in eighteenth-century anonymous satire
Journal Title: Token: A Journal of English Linguistics - Year 2017, Vol 6, Issue 1
Abstract
This paper explores constructions of social identity in eighteenth-century dialogues written by the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800). These three satirical dialogues are set in the Underworld between mythological figures and contemporary type characters, and they were included in Lord Lyttelton’s anonymously published The Dialogues of the Dead (1760). Social identity constructions in these texts are analysed through stance-taking, specifically in terms of evaluation and the identification of social values. Montagu’s satires are instructional and judgmental, and the social values advocated through the voices of her characters are assumed to represent the author’s own social identity and the values of the bluestocking circle. Through her judgment of the empty lives of fashionable women, entertainment-driven readers and the capitalist greed of the publishing industry, Montagu promotes the virtues of learning, morality, duty and self‑discipline. Social values function as identity markers of her moral and rational mind.
Authors and Affiliations
Anni Sairio
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP335046
- DOI -
- Views 184
- Downloads 0
Stance is present in scientific writing, indeed. Evidence from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing.
Stance as a pragmatic feature has been discussed widely in recent years, although the analysis of its presence in the scientific register has been more limited. Stance is most clearly seen in the use of adverbs (Quirk et...
Words of religious dissent in eighteenth-century Italian translations of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia
Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728) is the first relevant reference work of eighteenth-century British encyclopaedism. The impact of Chambers’s work was so widespread that in a...
Word-formations of recent borrowings from French to English: An analysis based on data from the Oxford English Dictionary.
It is a well‑known fact that French has enriched the English lexicon with a considerable number of words since before the Norman Conquest. The French impact on English vocabulary constitutes the focus of many studies on...
‘A cargo of coffee, sugar, and indigo’: Transatlantic business correspondence in nineteenth-century business letter-writing manuals.
This paper analyses two case-studies of specialised nineteenth-century business letter-writing manuals (Anderson 1836 and Williams – Lafont 1860). The investigation initially focuses on the dynamics of transnational expo...
Social identities in an institutional network: Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century
This paper offers a sociopragmatic analysis of the correspondence of the British Colonial Office pertaining to the colonisation of the Cape of Good Hope in the early nineteenth century. This setting poses fascinating que...