Keywords in the Press: The New Labour Years

Building on Raymond Williams' iconic "Keywords" released in 1975, Jeffries and Walker show how some pivotal words significantly increased in use and evolved in meaning during the years of the 'New Labour' project. Focussing on print news media, this book establishes a set of socio-political keywords for the 'Blair Years', and demonstrates how their evolving meanings are indicative of the ideological landscape in Britain at that time, and the extent to which the cultural hegemony of the New Labour project influenced the language of the commentariat.Combining corpus linguistic approaches with critical stylistics the authors conduct an analysis of two newspaper corpora using computational tools. Looking closely at textually-constructed meanings within the data, their investigation of the keywords has a qualitative focus, and sets out a clear methodology for combining corpus approaches with systematic co-textual analysis.

About the author

Lesley Jeffries is Principal Lecturer in English at Huddersfield University, UK.Brian Walker is a Visiting Researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. His research interests are in stylistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics, especially applied to literary and political discourses. He has co-authored books on discourse analysis (Canning and Walker 2024), stylistics (Lugea and Walker 2023), corpus stylistics (McIntyre and Walker 2019) and socio-political keywords (Jeffries and Walker 2017). His other published research focuses on using corpus linguistic approaches to analyse poetry (McIntyre and Walker 2022), discourses of austerity (Jeffries and Walker 2019, 2020), and Early Modern English news pamphlets (Walker and McIntyre 2015).

Product details

• Authors: Lesley Jeffries, Jeffries Lesley, Brian Walker
• Assisted by: Michaela Mahlberg (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 16.11.2017
• EAN: 9781441162229
• ISBN: 978-1-4411-6222-9
• No. of pages: 224
• Series: Corpus and Discourse; Corpus and Discourse
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics; Linguistics, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Semantics, Historical & comparative linguistics, Semantics, discourse analysis, stylistics, Historical and comparative linguistics, Semantics, discourse analysis, etc