Literature and the Press in France

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis editorial sets out the connections between literature and the press in nineteenth-century France, and assesses how these have been understood in critical scholarship in Europe and North America. It explores questions surrounding cultural history and socio-criticism, and considers how these inflect critical analysis of journalism’s influence on various forms of imaginative writing. Acknowledging how the newspaper became a space for new forms to be tested before entering the literary mainstream, the significance of interdisciplinary approaches to research in French studies is also highlighted. Noting the rise of internet resources, the editorial recognizes how online access to digitised nineteenth-century newspapers offers researchers an immersion in journalistic debates previously unimaginable beyond the walls of the Bibliothèque nationale.