Generic Features of Murder Articles from the Nineteenth Century in the Morning Post Newspaper

Abstract

This thesis focuses on analysing murder articles from 19th century England as a genre. All of the murder articles were collected from one single newspaper, the Morning Post, which was one of the influential newspapers that operated throughout 19th century England. The aim of this thesis is to identify the reappearing generic features, called moves, of murder articles and analyse their frequency. In other words, perform a genre analysis of murder articles from the 19th century. This is done by following the framework of move analysis created by John M.Swales and Vijay K. Bhatia. To identify the moves, I performed a close reading of thirty selected murder articles. Three murder articles were collected per decade throughout the 19th century. In addition, I briefly analyse other notable features of the murder articles, which are the vocabulary used when describing the victim as well as the murderer. I also look into the headlines used with the murder articles. In the analysis, I identified ten distinctive moves which were Time and place, Victims name and information, Legal system (police and court), Discovery of the body, Murderers name and information, Description of the body and crime scene, Events leading to death, Medical statement, Murder method, and finally the Reason for murder. The moves are presented and analysed according to their frequency, the first being the most frequent move in the analysis. The results show that the murder articles in the 19th century indeed had certain moves that were crucial to the murder articles. Not all moves appeared in all of the murder articles.