This course will trace historical connections between journalism and literary traditions. It will focus on a group of novelists and literary figures with strong connections to the world of journalism – from Daniel Defoe to Joan Didion – and will trace their contributions to the English literary canon beginning in the long eighteenth century (when the novel and the periodical — i.e. the Spectator and the Tattler — were emerging as powerful cultural forces in England) right up to the late twentieth century and the emergence of “new journalism” in America. The course has been divided into four broad sections: the long eighteenth century (the era of the “birth of the novel”), the nineteenth century explosion of the printing press (“Penny Press” newspapers in England, and McClure’s and Collier’s in America), the Algonquin Round Table years of the early twentieth century, and the emergence of “new journalism” in the 1960s and 1970s.
