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This paper examines the reception of Vittorio Alfieri in Milan. If the Enlightened city of the Habsburg had proved quite insensitive to this poet of «strong feeling», during the Jacobin Triennium, Alfieri’s tragedies were frequently performed on republican stages, and long reviews about his plays, published in the Milanese Jacobin journals, welcomed the creation of a new repertoire worthy of a free people. Even though those highly politicized journalists have long been taken as witnesses above suspicion, a look into some original documents and an analysis of Alfieri’s texts performed, or (often quite surprisingly) not chosen for the scenes, make it clear that the popularity of Alfieri’s works on Milanese scenes was connected to the French establishment and its needs to manufacture consent not less than to a call for a genuine patriotic, revolutionary and republican theatre.

This paper describes a work in progress which aims to demonstrate how one example of the specific domain of financial journalism is increasingly employing a more monologic authorial style, in which the writers communicate their knowledge and ideas, employing discourse structures which reduce or eliminate aspects of discourse which typically serve to create a textual relationship between writers and readers. The work arises from previous research in which the case was argued for considering the Lex column in the Financial Times (FT) as a genre in its own right (Anderson 2007), basing its definition of genre on Bhatia (1993), “a recognisable communicative event characterised by a set of communicative purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs. Most often it is highly structured and conventionalised with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form and functional value” (Bhatia; 1993:3). The Lex column has evolved stable discourse features which make it a recognisable communicative event and the textual pattern facilitates its communicative goals of analysis, comment and evaluation. During the research into the Lex column we noted a shift to an increasingly more authoritarian discourse style. In order to investigate whether this shift was also taking place in other established areas of financial journalism, we decided to analyse the editorial section from the FT.

The volumes contains a collection of papers originated in the workshop entitled "Specialised Usages of English in economic and Business Contexts", which was held in the University of Milan-Bicocca, on November 12th-13th 2009.