Analysing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor

Exploring speeches by public figures such as Taylor Swift, Greta Thunberg, Emma Watson, Tony Blair, and Donald Trump, this engaging textbook explains the ways in which political speeches can be analysed.It examines the role of language in speeches and how it can be used to challenge or reinforce prevailing social, cultural and political attitudes.The author breaks down why and how speeches are effective, impactful, and important through a variety of topics and lenses in order to provide a framework to better understand them. Each chapter introduces a particular discourse approach and then applies this in a model analysis of a passage of text.The chosen texts concern issues of social, cultural and political importance that address topics of significant importance to the audience to which they were delivered.Students are encouraged to engage with the text and consider how approaches to text analysis, such as cohesion, context analysis and metaphor analysis, may be adapted to provide a mo