Abstract
The Introduction lays out the arguments developed in Fictions of the Press, and notes the major critical traditions in the field of studies of literature and journalism in the nineteenth century. A number of literary examples are highlighted, with reflection focused on figures such as Stendhal, Balzac and Zola.
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Notes
- 1.
Henry James, The Reverberator, Madame de Mauves, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 146.
- 2.
Stendhal, Romans et nouvelles, ed. by Henri Martineau, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), I, 240.
- 3.
For details of the original Gazette des Tribunaux reports of the Berthet case, see Stendhal, Romans et nouvelles, I, 715–730. For a discussion of the influence of this case on Stendhal’s novel, see Ann Jefferson, Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 67–72.
- 4.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 83.
- 5.
Ibid., pp. 82–84 (p. 83).
- 6.
Note the title of Christophe Charle’s Le Siècle de la presse, 1830–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
- 7.
See, for example, Martyn Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 1: ‘On the eve of the French Revolution under half (47 per cent) of the male population of France, and about 27 per cent of the French women, could read. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, functional literacy had become almost universal for both French men and women.’ See also James Smith Allen, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
- 8.
Robert Darnton, ‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 23 (1986), 5–30 (p. 5).
- 9.
For one example of this phenomenon, see the publication of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami in Gil Blas, from 6 April to 30 May 1885.
- 10.
Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 118. In these figures, Terdiman is referencing Claude Bellanger et al. (eds), Histoire générale de la presse française, 5 vols (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1969–1976), II, 18, 24, 120, 259, and Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973–1977), II, 540.
- 11.
On this point, see Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 111–118.
- 12.
Paul Brulat, Le Reporter: roman contemporain (Paris: Perrin, 1898), p. 92.
- 13.
Here, Zola proves an adept historian of the periodical press, stressing the newspaper’s transformation in an 1877 article for the St Petersburg monthly Le Messager de l’Europe. See Zola journaliste: articles et chroniques, ed. by Adeline Wrona (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), pp. 222–255 (p. 226). Popular, miscellaneous but often brief articles, the faits divers were a common feature of the nineteenth-century French press.
- 14.
See, for example, Eric Cahm, L’Affaire Dreyfus: Histoire, politique et société (Paris: Livre de poche, 1994), pp. 97–146.
- 15.
These interests are emphasised in the recent publication of selected journalism by various leading nineteenth-century writers. See, for example, Balzac journaliste: articles et chroniques, ed. by Marie-Ève Thérenty (Paris: Flammarion, 2014); Hugo journaliste: articles et chroniques, ed. by Marieke Stein (Paris: Flammarion, 2014); Baudelaire journaliste: articles et chroniques, ed. by Alain Vaillant (Paris: Flammarion, 2011).
- 16.
This dynamic field of study has produced an array of texts exploring the nineteenth-century French press, not least La Civilisation du journal. Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, ed. by Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2011). Thérenty’s work in particular has proved critical to such endeavours: see La Littérature au quotidien. Poétiques journalistiques au XIX siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2007); Mosaïques. Être écrivain entre presse et roman (1829–1836) (Paris: Champion, 2003); Thérenty and Vaillant, 1836: L’An 1 de l’ère médiatique: étude littéraire et historique du journal La Presse d’Émile de Girardin (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2001); Thérenty and Vaillant (eds), Presse et plumes: Journalisme et littérature au XIXe siècle (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2004); Thérenty and Vaillant (eds), Presse, nations et mondialisation au XIXe siècle (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2010). See Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin, Les Discours du journal: rhétorique et médias au XIXe siècle (1836–1885) (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2007). See also Guillaume Pinson, La Culture médiatique francophone en Europe et en Amérique du Nord: De 1760 à la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2016). Note, finally, the website Médias 19, a crucial platform for new research in this field: http://www.medias19.org [accessed 1 September 2016].
- 17.
See Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, pp. 117–146. For further Anglophone scholarship on the French press, note Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds), Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); David H. Walker, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the ‘Fait Divers’ (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995). On Victorian journalism, see Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 18.
Jeremy Popkin, Press, Revolution, and Social Identities in France, 1830–1835 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), see pp. 1–22.
- 19.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 30–33 (p. 33).
- 20.
Ibid., p. 35.
- 21.
Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–30 (p. 15).
- 22.
Guillaume Pinson, L’Imaginaire médiatique. Histoire et fiction du journal au XIXe siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012), p. 10. Note also Thérenty, ‘Le journal dans le roman du XIXe siècle ou l’icône renversée’, in Le Roman du signe. Fiction et herméneutique au XIXe siècle, ed. by Andrea Del Lungo and Boris Lyon-Caen (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2007), pp. 25–38.
- 23.
Thérenty, La Littérature au quotidien, p. 19.
- 24.
Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers, p. 18. Rubery goes on to outline the connections between the Victorian period and the modern news industry and points to the central concerns of his own research: ‘Journalists of the nineteenth century raised the very question underpinning these chapters—“what is news?”—that continues to preoccupy editorial staffs in their efforts to reach “the million”, that mythic number of readers initially sought by the Victorian press and long ago surpassed by modern media enterprise.’ At certain junctures of this argument, I too shall be drawn to this question ‘what is news?’—a point central to Bel-Ami’s reflection on the limits of actualité.
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Birch, E. (2018). Introduction. In: Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72200-9_1
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