Overview

This book explores how writers responded to the rise of the newspaper over the course of the nineteenth century. Taking as its subject the ceaseless intertwining of fiction and journalism at this time, it tracks the representation of newspapers and journalists in works by Honoré de Balzac, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Guy de Maupassant. This was an era in which novels were published in newspapers and novelists worked as journalists. In France, fiction was to prove an utterly crucial presence at the newspaper’s heart, with a gilded array of predominant literary figures active in journalism. Today, few in search of a novel would turn to the pages of a daily newspaper. But what are usually cast as discrete realms – fiction and journalism – came, in the nineteenth century, to occupy the same space, a point which complicates our sense of the cultural history of French literature.

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9783319721996

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Reviews

Edmund Birch's monograph skilfully explores different aspects of the interrelationship between fiction and newspapers in nineteenth-century France through a study of selected seminal novels of journalism. ... The text is extremely well written, with an enviable clarity of expression and lucidity of exposition, not least in its use of literary theory. Overall the book represents a significant scholarly contribution to our understanding of both nineteenth-century French literature and the cultural history of journalism in France. (Raymond Kuhn, Modern & Contemporary France, December 10, 2019)

Valles's enthusiasm for the press, including establishment newspapers, which he viewed as a tool of a personal emancipation and revolutionary political agitation, would also have supplied a useful counterpoint to the uniformly pessimistic portrayals of journalism discussed in Fictions of the Press. Many other writers from the period who used the press as a literary laboratory merit similar attention. Birch's book provides an excellent model for future research on that theme. (Max McGuinness, Modern Language Review, Vol. 115 (4), October, 2020) Edmund Birch's monograph skilfully explores different aspects of the interrelationship between fiction and newspapers in nineteenth-century France through a study of selected seminal novels of journalism. ... The text is extremely well written, with an enviable clarity of expression and lucidity of exposition, not least in its use of literary theory. Overall the book represents a significant scholarly contribution to our understanding of both nineteenth-century French literature and the cultural history of journalism in France. (Raymond Kuhn, Modern & Contemporary France, December 10, 2019)

Author Information

Edmund Birch teaches French Literature at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he is Director of Studies and College Lecturer at Churchill College and Selwyn College. He is Co-Editor of ‘Literature and the Press in France’, a special number of the journal Dix-Neuf (2017), and the author of a number of articles on French literature and the cultural history of journalism.

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