Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France [Paperback]

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 newspapers 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.Birch has written a rich, textured, and thoughtful analysis of the novel of journalism in nineteenth-century France. The significance of his book to our understanding of the periods social and intellectual life is as far-reaching as literary realism itself, which the works under study here all represent. (James Smith Allen, H-France Review, Vol. 20 (190), October, 2020)