The Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism

William Dow, Roberta Maguire, William E. Dow, Roberta S. Maguire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315525990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Taking a thematic approach, this new companion provides an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and international study of American literary journalism.From the work of Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman to that of Joan Didion and Dorothy Parker, literary journalism is a genre that both reveals and shapes American history and identity. This volume not only calls attention to literary journalism as a distinctive genre but also provides a critical foundation for future scholarship. It brings together cutting-edge research from literary journalism scholars, examining historical perspectives; themes, venues, and genres across time; theoretical approaches and disciplinary intersections; and new directions for scholarly inquiry.

Provoking reconsideration and inquiry, while providing new historical interpretations, this companion recognizes, interacts with, and honors the tradition and legacies of American literary journalism scholarship. Engaging the work of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, African American studies, gender studies, visual studies, media studies, and American studies, in addition to journalism and literary studies, this book is perfect for students and scholars of those disciplines.

PART I

Historical Perspectives

1

From the Boston News-Letter to the “Couranteers”

Epistolarity, Reportage, and Entertaining Literature in Colonial American Newspapers

Colin T. Ramsey

While the generic boundaries of literary journalism continue to be a subject of scholarly debate, one current, broadly applicable description of the genre describes it as “journalistically-based narratives empowered by literary technique and aesthetic sensibility.”¹ Eighteenth-century readers, however, would likely have found this definition somewhat confusing, and thus to understand the colonial origins of American literary journalism, we must also examine how the terms at issue in the contemporary debates about the genre’s boundaries have themselves shifted over time, with the long eighteenth century—circa 1688–1815—being a particularly important period of change. Consider, for example, Samuel Johnson’s famous eighteenth-century Dictionary of the English Language: Johnson provides no dedicated entry at all for the word “journalism,” and “journalist” Johnson defines as “a writer of journals,” that is, a diarist.² In Johnson’s day, the printed newspaper was itself rather new, and thus it is not surprising that journalism, as we understand the term, was all but unknown to Johnson.³

Johnson’s Dictionary also has no dedicated entry for “newspaper,” and it describes “news” as existing across a variety of communicative media, both written and spoken, defining it simply as “a fresh account of anything.” Johnson, somewhat perfunctorily, follows this with what he clearly sees as a less important secondary definition: “papers which give an account of the transactions of the present times.”⁴ In all the above we can see the world of Anglophone textual culture shifting right under Johnson’s lexicographical feet.

Johnson was correct to sense things were changing: while movable type printing had been in use since Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century, the eighteenth century witnessed such an explosion of print as to fundamentally alter the way people read. This shift has been described as a “reading revolution,” a historical moment when reading habits radically shifted from longstanding forms of “intensive” reading of a very small number of texts, over and over (principally scripture), to a more “extensive reading” style in which readers consumed multitudes of often ephemeral texts, such as periodicals and novels, and, generally, read them only once.⁵ If we bear in mind these fundamental changes in readers’ habits and preferences during the eighteenth century, we can more clearly see how the generic features that define a given piece of writing as literary journalism, rather than, say, as a piece of traditional reportage journalism, are themselves derived from the development of what were still relatively new forms of media in the eighteenth century.

In this chapter, I will thus explore two moments of special significance to the colonial origins of American literary journalism. I will begin with a discussion of the first “newspaper” qua newspaper in British North America, the Boston News-Letter, and examine its close relationship with a then more common form of news-reportage periodical, the manuscript newsletter. Second, I will analyze some of the first examples of more demonstrably “literary” writing in a colonial American newspaper, the satiric and entertaining essays of “Couranteers” in James Franklin’s New-England Courant.

A number of scholars have noted that the rise of “realism” in both fictional and nonfictional writing in the US during the post-Civil War period was a signal moment in the development of modern narrative literary journalism. Thomas Connery, for example, describes the period as marking a “shift [to] … a new cultural paradigm, a paradigm of actuality.”⁶ The essays of the Couranteers, though they precede the arrival of that “paradigm of actuality” by more than a century, nonetheless deployed a fictional frame that, significantly, refracted an actual practice: The essays were presented as printed versions of letters to the editor in order to mark them off from the more traditional forms of eighteenth-century news reportage that appeared in the Courant’s pages. These “letters” by the Couranteers were comically satirical, often narrative, and always designed to entertain readers, and in these ways, they were demonstrably “literary,” especially as compared to the very brief and context-free reports of news that were typical to the manuscript newsletters and early printed newspapers. That is, the development of newspapers from the earlier manuscript newsletters and then the arrival of the witty and imaginative literary essays in such newspapers inaugurated by the Couranteers were both significantly enabled by the modalities of epistolary writing.

As Katrina Quinn persuasively argues, a kind of “epistolary journalism” that was popular in nineteenth-century America—a form that was discursively narrative and alternated between the subjective voice of personal correspondence and the more impersonal “journalistic” voice—constituted a variety of literary journalism a century older than the New Journalism of the twentieth century. Along similar lines, this essay pushes what Quinn calls the historical “pedigree” of American literary journalism back even further in time, to the early eighteenth century, and it highlights the importance of epistolary modes of writing and the mail service to the rise of both the printed newspaper and some of the earliest examples of literary journalism in colonial America.⁷

John Campbell’s Boston News-Letter: Manuscript “News” and the First Printed American Newspaper

It is generally accepted that the first successful American newspaper—that is, a printed newspaper in colonial British North America that ran longer than a few isolated issues—was John Campbell’s Boston News-Letter, which first appeared in print on April 24, 1704.⁸ Campbell had succeeded his father Duncan as Boston’s postmaster in 1702, and, also like his father, he had for some time been sending manuscript “newsletters” he periodically compiled to a number of regular subscribers: government officials, ministers, and other well-placed readers around Boston and other parts of New England. Postmasters occupied especially significant nodes in the information networks of the British Atlantic: They were usually the first to see manuscript newsletters coming in through the mails as well as the newer, printed news broadsheets and “newspapers” that were increasingly popular in London and were beginning to be received by readers in the colonies.⁹ Postmasters also routinely participated in verbal exchanges of news with postriders and other individuals who frequently came through the post offices to send and pick up mail.¹⁰ As Boston’s postmaster, Campbell thus had ready access to large volumes of just the sort of information readers of his own manuscript newsletters wanted and needed.

As was the case in the London metropole, Campbell’s colonial readers called the information they read in his newsletter “intelligence,” a term that had been applied to the written news provided in manuscript newsletters all around the British Atlantic during much of the preceding century. The patron-readers of these “intelligences” expected the information relayed to be the most accurate and up to date available; they required as much for their professional activities in government, business, and, especially in New England, the church. Indeed, demand for accurate written “intelligence” had become so strong in London by the late seventeenth century that a class of professional scribes had developed who specialized in writing just such newsletters. These early journalists-in-manuscript were themselves called “intelligencers,” and their individual reputations (and, correspondingly, their respective numbers of paid subscribers) depended upon the timeliness and accuracy of the “intelligences” they provided.

Another factor in the steady popularity of manuscript newsletters was continual improvement in mail service across Britain (and across much of Europe), a phenomenon that also contributed to the rise of the printed newspaper. As Andrew Pettegree argues, “The wholesale transformation of the international postal service … made possible the invention of the newspaper,”¹¹ because it made the communication of information that much more timely and affordable, and, over the years, this increased demand for written sources of news. Thus print became an increasingly attractive medium for news “intelligences,” as print could meet this growing demand for written news more cheaply and quickly than manuscript. Campbell’s decision to move his manuscript newsletter into print in early eighteenth-century Boston, then, reflected a broader, if still somewhat gradual, transformation that had been taking place all around the British Atlantic for some decades.¹²

In any case, for both manuscript newsletters and their subsequent printed “newspaper” counterparts, the news was always conveyed within a narrow set of stylistic parameters. Whether the “intelligence” reported was “court gossip, a judicial action, or a military or diplomatic report from abroad,” the style was always the same: “a terse one- or two-sentence paragraph devoid of explanation or background, since the recipient was assumed to be in need of neither.”¹³ This was the style Campbell used for his manuscript newsletters, and he largely carried it forward into his printed Boston News-Letter. Indeed, the close relationship between Campbell’s manuscript “intelligences” and his subsequent printed newspaper was visible on the latter’s front page; “News-Letter” in the title makes explicit that Campbell expected his readers would understand his printed newspaper to be a continuation of his earlier manuscript newsletters, although he also copied the phrase “Published by Authority” from a leading early newspaper being printed back in London, the London Gazette, and he placed it d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Foreword by Robert S. Boynton
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Historical Perspectives
• PART II: Themes, Venues, and Genres across Time
• PART III: Theorizing American Literary Journalism Disciplinary Intersections
• PART IV: New Directions for Scholarly Inquiry
• Index