Waterloo Discourses: The Language of War in Newspapers

Waterloo brought an end to the French Wars, “unprecedented in their scale and impact on British society” [Ramsey 2006, p. 117]. More than that, Waterloo was news. [Cathcart 2015, p. 19-20]. This article draws on both the unprecedentedness and the news quality of Waterloo to explore its construal [Fairclough 2003] in the coeval press. To that effect, press texts dating from the im- mediate aftermath of Waterloo (22 June 1815) are collected aiming to account for first reactions. The corpus is then digitized and analysed using LancsBox. Two research questions are presented and, subsequently, operationalized drawing up a list of potentially relevant lexical words whose quantitative and qualitative presence in the corpus is verified and assessed [McEnery and Hardie 2012, McEnery and Brezina 2019]. The corpus is further analysed using social actor theory [van Leeuwen 2008] to address the research questions.