Journalism, Literature and Modernity

Journalism has often been disregarded by literary critics and authors alike. Its difference from literature has been heightened by its identification with daily newspaper journalism and reporting. Yet 'journalism' broadly refers to all writing in public journals, spanning high culture and popular culture. It has been central to experiences of modernity, making its dismissal problematic. Journalism, Literature and Modernity considers journalism in its diversity, suggesting its aptness for interdisciplinary study. The authors examine writing in journals across a cultural spectrum--literary journals, organs of culture, magazines, journals promoting modernism, and daily newspapers. Demonstrating a variety of approaches, they explore journalism's importance in relation to gender, modernity and modernism through readings of established writers and critics -- William Hazlitt, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Laura Riding -- and journals and journalists -- Henry Mayhew, The Fortnightly Review, Dora Marsden and the Freewoman/Egoist sequence. Their studies challenge received ideas of journalism's significance in literary and cultural history, as well as perceptions of modernity and modernism.