Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Journalism and the rise of the novel, 1700–1875: Daniel Defoe to George Eliot
- Chapter 2 Literary realism and the fictions of the industrialized press, 1850–1915: Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser
- Chapter 3 Reporters as novelists and the making of contemporary journalistic fiction, 1890–today: Rudyard Kipling to Joan Didion
- Chapter 4 The taint of journalistic literature and the stigma of the ink-stained wretch: Joel Chandler Harris to Dorothy Parker and beyond
- Epilogue: The future of journalistic fiction and the legacy of the journalist-literary figures: Henry James to Tom Wolfe
- Appendix: The major journalist-literary figures: their writings and positions in journalism
- Notes
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Journalism and the rise of the novel, 1700–1875: Daniel Defoe to George Eliot
- Chapter 2 Literary realism and the fictions of the industrialized press, 1850–1915: Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser
- Chapter 3 Reporters as novelists and the making of contemporary journalistic fiction, 1890–today: Rudyard Kipling to Joan Didion
- Chapter 4 The taint of journalistic literature and the stigma of the ink-stained wretch: Joel Chandler Harris to Dorothy Parker and beyond
- Epilogue: The future of journalistic fiction and the legacy of the journalist-literary figures: Henry James to Tom Wolfe
- Appendix: The major journalist-literary figures: their writings and positions in journalism
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.
– From the preface of Daniel Defoe's Robinson CrusoeThere is … scarcely any species of writing of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are its constituents; every new genius produces some innovation, which, when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of foregoing authors had established.
– Samuel JohnsonThough as we have good authority for all our characters, no less indeed than the vast authentic book of nature … our labors have sufficient title to the name history. Certainly they deserve some distinction from those works, which one of the wittiest of men regarded only as proceeding from … a looseness of the brain.
– Henry Fielding in defending Tom Jones against charges that it was a mere “novel”The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
– Samuel JohnsonIn the middle of the contemporary novel, Long John Silver, a fanciful account of what happened to Robert Louis Stevenson's treacherous and enigmatic pirate hero, there appears a character based upon a real-life literary figure who has long intrigued journalism and literary historians: Daniel Defoe, the eighteenth-century novelist and journalist who – in Bjorn Larsson's fictional memoir – meets Long John Silver while putting together a book about pirates.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Journalism and the NovelTruth and Fiction, 1700–2000, pp. 1 - 31Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008