Newspapers are an evil: Fiction, Journalism and the 19th Century

Edmund Birch is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and works on French literature and cultural history. In his talk at the Reuters Institute, he will explore key points of his research on the relation between fiction and the press in the 19th century, and what it could mean for present-day debates on the role of journalism.

1. The history of the press in France and in particular the nineteenth century – the age of the rise of the press. His work looks to expose the points of continuity and difference which characterise our current sense of the media and its history.

2. The relation of fiction to journalism. This is at the heart of his work: the idea that, in the French context specifically, fiction plays an absolutely central role in the rise of the press. The economic health of newspapers was often tied to the kinds of fiction serialised in such newspapers. Today, few would expect to find a novel serialised in a daily paper – and yet this was a critical part of the newspaper’s history in the nineteenth century.

3. Fictions of the press. How is journalism represented in novels, plays, and other kinds of imaginative writing? This was the focus of Edmund Birch’s thesis, and first book; what kind of image of the press emerged in literature of the nineteenth century?