The research units

UNIT 1: University of Milan

Members of Unit 1 analyse what ‘well-being’ meant in the Late Modern Anglo-American worldview, by identifying the roots of this concepts and its connections with wellness or happiness.

The following topics are considered:

• (Self) education: popular teaching materials published in Britain and the USA in Late Modern times, when literacy rates increased thanks to such institutions as ‘ragged schools’, mechanics’ institutes, and charitable associations which promoted the publication of inexpensive self-education texts. The texts analysed include handbooks and instruction books, magazines, ephemera, and general reference works for the self-education of adult readers in subjects like history, geography, cookery, domestic medicine and commerce.
• Ego documents: diaries, memoirs, and correspondence, whose authors provide “unmonitored” (van der Wal & Rutten 2013) discourses on well-being and healthy living beyond the dictates of educators, medical practitioners, religious authorities and other institutions.

By adopting the methodologies of historical sociolinguistics, the texts examined reveal how well-being was perceived in the Late Modern period. The analysis also indicates how descriptions of well-being fitted into the general framework of educational and private discourse at the time.

UNIT 2: University of Bergamo

Members of Unit 2 focus on how leisure, entertainment and cultural activities came to be seen as ways for ‘improving’ people’s life and therefore increasing their well-being. Members of Unit 2 consider text types that addressed different audiences in terms of class, gender, and/or educational level. As the focus is on 19th century popular culture, specific attention is also paid to the new approaches to the environment that emerged on both sides of the Atlantic at the time.

In Late Modern times a rapid increase in literacy, the introduction of the steam press, new school laws, and fast urbanisation opened the market to a variety of materials and forms of escapism:

• newspapers and periodicals;
• various ‘Great Exhibitions’ that ran both in Britain and in the US (Cartosio 2018);
• songs and ballads, often with political overtones (Dossena 2013);
• promotional materials (for entertainment, trade or tourism);
• cheap serialized novels (e.g. dime novels – see Bold 1987, Denning 1987, Cartosio 2010, Rosso 2016).

An interdisciplinary study of these materials and forms indicates that entertainment is a valuable aspect of cultural heritage worth preserving and analysing.

Members of the unit also investigate the ideological approach informing such materials. According to this ideological approach, persuasion could be achieved through texts that could encourage the participants’ involvement. These texts typically relied on multimodal elements – e.g. theatre posters (Dossena 2017) or satirical prints. In these texts, verbal and non-verbal elements mutually emphasise their communicative value and may thus antedate features that are often associated with contemporary materials.

Finally, members of Unit 2 consider how leisure activities were promoted in argumentative text types, showing how a new approach to the environment (Brownlees 2019, Slotkin 1985, Dossena 2016), to sports, and to a new idea of healthy life may reveal interactions among medical, nutritional, and cultural considerations.

UNIT 3: University of Florence

Members of Unit 3 examine the role of print news in Britain and Ireland in promoting understanding and civic participation in societal issues of the past. Members of the unit analyse the role of epistolary print news in the promotion of peace and the affirmation of gender equality.

The texts analysed primarily comprise readers’ letters published in newspapers. Regarding gender awareness, particular attention is given to the 18th century British press and its comments on female social inequalities. Referring to relevant recent literature (Ingrassia 2015; Batchelor & Powell 2018), the unit aims to determine how print letters draw attention to women’s vulnerable status. Focusing on interrelating paratextual, linguistic and ideological components in the letters, members of Unit 3 draw upon Brownlees (2016a, 2016b), Schneider (2018), King (2018), Cavanagh & Steel (2019) and Cecconi (2020).

Print letters will also be examined in the context of 19th and 20th century newspapers. In this case, the notion of well-being relates to the idea and realisation of social harmony and peace. Although the 19th century witnessed the emergence of the transnational peace movement, the concept of peace appears to be ambivalent (Sylvest 2009). Adopting corpus linguistic methodology (Samson 2020a, 2020b), members of the unit examine the use of peace discourse in letters to the editor in the 19th century press.

Members of Unit 3 also address issues of civic participation in the Irish press of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, i.e. the period known as the Irish Revival (Mazzi 2019). The research addresses the strategies through which newspapers promoted – and readers sought – participation in a shared public sphere eliding the sectarian divisions of the Reformation (Mathews 2003).

UNIT 4: University of Insubria

Members of Unit 4 examine the role of science in promoting individual and public health. Members of the unit analyse how concepts related to well-being as derived from good physical and mental health (Bergdolt 2008) emerge discursively and linguistically from diverse text types and genres from the mid-18th to the early 20th centuries.

In the 19th century, through the dissemination of British medical literature, the US embraced science-based practices as the medical education system changed (Rutkow 2012). Thus, the main research question of Unit 4 deals with how crucial medical and scientific changes (Cunningham & Williams 1992; Bynum 1994; Porter 1995; Lane 2001) and consequent new practices and actors connected to well-being/health enhancement were construed and textually represented.

New texts aimed to communicate medical discourse at different levels reflected a tendency toward specialisation (Lonati 2017, Taavitsainen & Hiltunen 2019, Vicentini 2020). Members of Unit 4 analyse texts addressing various readerships and their needs:

• the specialist community of physicians and licensed practitioners (medical reports; professional letters; journal papers; treatises);
• the educated lay readership (concise medical dictionaries or glossaries);
• the general public (self-help manuals; recipe collections; remedies for domestic medicine; popularising texts).

The main focus is on how authors recommended health improvement and, consequently, well-being and social progress for the individual and the community. A variety of topics (e.g. age- and gender-specific medicine, pain prevention, medical ethics, food recipes and dietary advice, etc) are investigated.

Credits: La Statale Immagini.