| Abstract | This thesis analyses the changes in language and genre in the journalism and serialised fiction of socialist newspapers during the period 1885 to 1895. The papers selected for this analysis are the Social Democratic Federation's paper justice, Henry Hyde Champions' Labour Elector, and Robert Blatchford's Clarion. These papers were selected for their involvement in the shifts of socialist politics during the period, and for their evidence of linguistic continuity under such political change. While all the papers accepted the general tenets of socialism, the power of the editor over the
individual construction of socialism is argued to be considerable. The theory of the linguistic tum is used to analyse the political and discursive shifts from Justice and
Hyndman's temporary embrace of revolutionary politics during the 1887 unemployment agitation, into Champion's New Unionism and parliamentary politics, and to Blatchford's independent politics, the formation of the Independent Labour Party, and the inclusion of the cultural into socialist politics.? The thesis selected a sustained journalistic campaign from each paper at the point of the political and discursive shift, and used it to analyse the linguistic make-up of each of the papers' contemporary socialism. The changing vocabulary of
socialism over the period is related to the linguistic tum's theory on the importance of the interaction between language and reality in effecting changes. While the vocabulary changes across the papers in accordance with events, the thesis notes a continuity in the inclusion of the older Tory political discourse, especially in patrician leadership and guidance. While Blatchford's Clarion overlaps socialism with the Liberal narratives of independence and improvement, he also re-formulated the Tory discourse of leadership to facilitate working-class independence. The findings of these discursive shifts are then applied to the serialised fictions, and each paper's use of fiction is analysed for the expression and expansion of its discrete articulation of socialism. The discourse of both Justice and the Clarion
is analysed through two long serialisations: James Borlase's 'Darker Than Death' (1885) and H. J. BramsbUlJ"S'A Working Class Tragedy' (1888-89) serialised in Justice, and Robert Blatchford's 'No.66' (1893) and Edward Francis Fay's 'Strictly Proper' (1893) from the Clarion. Champion's Labour Elector has only one fiction under scrutiny, Margaret Harkness's 'Connie' (1894) which was published under her pseudonym of John Law. This was the only serialised fiction carried by the paper, and the novel was incomplete at the time of the paper's demise. The use of genre as a vehicle for the fictional socialist polemic is addressed, as are the depictions of the socialist hero and the capitalist villain, linguistic evidence and illustrations of the shifts in socialist politics across the period under scrutiny, the
importance of the socialist vision for each novel's conclusion and the overlap of older discourses in constructing the language and images in the fiction. The socialist re-formulations of older discourses and genres to articulate their political perspectives will be analysed between the original discourses and genres and the
socialist changes made to accommodate a different political view. |
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