$198.49
Author: Raymond Joad
Brand: Clarendon Press
Edition: 1
Number Of Pages: 392
Details: Review
“Very highly recommended…for graduate students and researchers.”–Choice
“…richly researched and documented…”–Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900
Product Description
The first newsbooks, the direct predecessors of modern newspapers, appeared in 1641, yet the reasons for their appearance have never been fully understood. In this book, Raymond charts the development of the English newsbook from its origins to its gradual dominance in the information market. Using manuscript and printed sources, she places the newsbook’s appearance a few months before the outbreak of civil war, where it took root in the flourishing political print culture of the 1640’s.
From the Back Cover
The first weekly newspapers, or ‘newsbooks’, appeared in 1641. The reasons for their appearance have never been fully understood. The Invention of the Newspaper is the first interdisciplinary account of the origins and early development of the English newspaper, using both manuscript and printed evidence to account for the precise moment of the newsbook’s appearance – a few months before the outbreak of civil war. Raymond explores the newsbook’s unique place in the flourishing political print culture of the 1640s, showing how it drew from and then reformed elements of literary culture, being both produced by a public hunger for news and, in turn, creating a market for news. The Invention of the Newspaper explores evidence for the distribution and readership of seventeenth-century news publications, which suggests that the early newsbooks were widely read and highly influential, and that – even today – they influence the way in which seventeenth-century history is perceived. Charting the newsbook’s development as a genre, its narrative forms, literary merits and influences, and its relationship to other vehicles of communication, printed and spoken, such as sermons, almanacs, and play-pamphlets, Raymond presents a detailed exploration of the newsbook’s gradual dominance of the market for information.
About the Author
Joad Raymond is a Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen.
Release Date: 05-12-1996
Package Dimensions: 31x234x758
