Handbook of Political Discourse

Synthesising diverse research avenues for politics, discourse, and political discourse, this cutting-edge Handbook examines the formative traditions, current theoretical and methodological landscape, and genres and domains over which political discourse extends.

Drawing on rich and dynamic models in critical cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, metaphor analysis, context, and multimodality studies, leading scholars provide tools to analyse a broad range of traditional and modern genres of political communication. Taking a historical dive into formative traditions in political discourse, including rhetoric and social and poststructuralist theories, this Handbook revises these classical models of political communication against new empirical contexts to offer the most fruitful, objective, and universal methodologies to date. Examining propaganda, advertising, political speeches and election campaigns, this Handbook pays particular attention to newly arising genres and discourses which reflect the momentous changes in the public domain, fuelled by recent and developing events including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war.

Drawing diverse insights from a wide array of disciplines, this Handbook will prove invaluable to students and scholars of political theory, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, discourse analysis, and communication studies who are looking for innovative methodologies with which to analyse political discourse.

Edited by Piotr Cap, Professor of Linguistics, Department of Pragmatics, University of Łódź, Poland