Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France, 1st ed. 2018 Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature Series

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 Honore? 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.

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.

Provides new readings of crucial and often-discussed authors, such as Balzac and Maupassant, alongside lesser-known works, such as the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly Introduces Anglophone readers to a new and developing area of French studies Traces a neglected history of literary opposition to the rise of the newspapers