Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction

A scholarly examination of “new journalism”

Due to a burgeoning print marketplace during the late nineteenth century, urban newspapers felt pressure to create entertaining prose that appealed to readers, drawing on popular literary genres such as travel adventures, detective tales, and historical romances as a way of framing the news for readers. Using current events for their source documents, reporters fashioned their own dramas based on those that readers recognized from a broadly drawn l...