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Part of
Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse
Edited by Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 6] 2017
► pp. 81–96

Chapter 5
A modest proposal in The Gentleman’s Magazine

A peculiar eighteenth-century advertisement

The Gentleman’s Magazine (GM, 1732–1922) was the first periodical magazine targeted at an educated lay readership from polite society. Medical items and related issues were a regular feature, e.g. suicide was a recurring topic in its early years. One example of this was a 1755 mock advertisement advocating a discreet “remedy against life” suitable to “any nobleman, gentleman, or other man of wit, humour, and pleasure”. We approach our task from the point of view of historical pragmatics paying attention to the sociocultural context, and providing a rhetorical analysis to make sense of this peculiar advertisement. The ad seems to build on the dark side of a recently-deceased (1751), notorious Tory politician, who had been a central figure of polite society for decades, but the actual target of the satire must have been something else. We argue that the sociohistorical context with its shared knowledge, as well as the rhetorical structure and stylistic content of the ad itself, provide keys for making sense of the text.

Keywords: genre, period style, polite society, satire, irony, rhetorical analysis, pragmatic analysis, context, advertisement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research questions and our approach
  • 3.The Gentleman’s Magazine
  • 4.A peculiar advertisement
    • 4.1The purported aim and structure of the advertisement
    • 4.2On Swift’s coattails
    • 4.3An ironic satire?
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.6.05skl
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Taavitsainen, Irma
2020. A medical debate of “heated pamphleteering” in the early eighteenth century. In Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 312], ► pp. 142 ff. DOI logo

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