ABSTRACT
Of the four films discussed in this book, Magical Mystery Tour perhaps provides the best example of the way in which Fairclough's notion of reading 'the "texture" of the text' and van Dijk's ideas about the way in which discourses produced within texts, through a combination of setting, genre, topics, speech acts, participant positions, power relations and social meaning, come together to provide a holistic framework for analysis. Magical Mystery Tour is both musically and visually part of the psychedelic scene that had established itself in the UK in this period. Classic children's texts such as Wind in the Willows, with its rural idyllic ideal as an escape from the industrialisation at work in the UK when it was written, or A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, written following his traumatic First World War experiences, are other texts which offer an escape into rural tranquility.
