Newspapers and their Beginnings: Fiction, Journalism, Realism
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Speaker: Edmund Birch (Churchill College, Cambridge)
This paper will take as its subject the relationship between realist fiction and the press in the context of nineteenth-century France. This was an era of radical growth for the newspaper industry, with circulation multiplying by some 4000 per cent in the years between 1830 and 1880. Scholarship in the field of nineteenth-century French studies has, over the last ten years, returned to the rise of journalism with the aim of exploring the set of relationships and connections which bind novelists, poets and dramatists to the world of the press. With reference to some of the ways in which the idea of realism has occupied critics writing on nineteenth-century culture, the present paper will evoke a set of beginnings, contrasting prefatory texts by Balzac and Maupassant with the kinds of ‘préfaces’ or ‘avant-propos’ frequently published as part of the very first edition of numerous nineteenth-century newspapers. In their different ways, the writings of both Balzac and Maupassant were marked by the rise of journalism; indeed, both novelists worked as journalists at one time or another. By reading fiction and the news together, then, we get a sense of the overlapping set of motifs given to nineteenth-century discussions of representation, to questions of truth, verisimilitude and realism.