Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth Century

This book is a collection of 12 papers dealing with manipulation and ideology in the 20th century, mostly with reference to political speeches by the leaders of major totalitarian regimes, but also addressing propaganda within contemporary right-wing populism and western ideological rhetoric. This book aims at bringing together researchers in the field of ideology reproduction in order to better understand the underlying mechanisms of speaker-favourable belief inculcation through language use. The book covers a wide range of theoretical perspectives, from psychosocial approaches and discourse analysis to semantics and cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The book’s central concern is to provide not only a reference work with up-to-date information on the analysis of manipulation in discourse but also a number of tools for the scholar, some of them being developed within theories originally not designed to address belief-change through language interpretation. Foreword by Frans van Eemeren.

Katharina Barbe, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Northern Illinois University, on Linguist List, Vol. 17.2291 (2006):
[...] all in all, the book is an invaluable contribution and should be a 'must read' for anybody investigating manipulation and ideology. It shows that researchers can come to similar conclusions by means of different approaches and thus suggests that an eclectic, data-driven approach may be what is ultimately needed.