The written press in nineteenth-century rhetorical manuals: generic demarcations and language ideologies

Abstract

The development of print journalism in the nineteenth century led Hispanic handbooks of rhetoric to deal with journalistic genres. At that time, increasing numbers of Hispanic handbooks of rhetoric intended for secondary school education were being published, and were also used as reference works for preparing oral and written public speeches. At first they were unspecific and dealt with political eloquence, didactic prose or historical texts, an approach that endured in many subsequent treatises, even into the early twentieth century. However, in the mid-nineteenth century, Vicente Fidel López made progress by considering types of publications – newspapers and magazines – and the features of their most outstanding genres. Subsequently, various treatise writers, aware of the importance attained by the industrial press and the development of informative journalism, broadened the range of sections recording and proposing brief characterizations of some of those genres. In this article I shall analyze those stages, focusing on the linguistic ideologies that motivated not only the social function of the press, but also the genres included in the treatises. I shall claim that although the rhetoric normative device served to consider journalistic writing, it constituted an obstacle insofar as it did not consider the actual practice of editorial offices and the importance taken on by the figure of the reader. By contrast, these aspects were considered in the handbooks of journalism published as from the 1890s.