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Richard Wright’s journalism has been largely unexamined by Wright scholars. He has never been studied as a literary journalist and rarely placed in an African American tradition of journalism. William Dow’s chapter focuses on works that best reveal Wright as a heretofore unrecognized literary journalist: 12 Million Black Voices (1940) and a selection of his exile writings: Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, (1954), The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957). It demonstrates the usefulness of literary journalistic forms to Wright as an African American writer and global humanitarian. This chapter also shows how Wright, while advancing his aesthetic aims, repurposed traditional journalism in order to promote a political solidarity with oppressed people around the world.

This chapter provides an anatomy of the Downing English School. It reconstructs the undergraduate population from 1932 until Leavis's retirement in 1962 using archival records and establishes the social background of these students. The chapter goes on to identify the professions in which Leavis's pupils clustered and considers the connections and disconnects between their Cambridge education and their subsequent careers. The most common career choice was teaching, and significant numbers went on to become publishers, BBC staff, actors, and directors. Others made use of their training in professions alien or inimical to Leavis, such as advertising. Still others went on to careers in business or the professions. As well as being the leader of a movement, Leavis was a college teacher like other college teachers, working with undergraduates for whom literature would not be a vocation.

Andrew Reynolds speaks to the genre of journalism as mask for modernista writers of Spanish America. In this chapter, authors engaged in practices of cultural cover-ups in their quests for aesthetic autonomies-which in turn complicate traditional notions of “high” modernism. Writers from the Spanish-American modernista movement broke from previous canons to create an innovative poetic voice. Nevertheless, the vast majority of their writing was produced within the context of the journalistic “chronicle” or crónica. Modernistas published thousands of these brief pieces of literary journalism that often masked intentions of aesthetic renovation because their experiments with literary form and style took place within the market-driven format of the newspaper. All the while the group—including Rubén Dario, José Martí, Amado Nervo and José Juan Tablada—expressed mixed feelings on the journalism industry, often disparaging the “lesser” forms of the reporter, in an attempt to create literary prestige. This juxtaposition often led to tensions between literary writers and the market. Reynolds argues that the hybrid production of revolutionary literary forms masked by a market-driven aesthetic reflects a peculiar Spanish American modernism that accounts for local realities and paves the way for international Boom artists in the coming decades.

Chapter Four: a discussion of Murakami’s work as a literary journalist, chiefly in his writings on the 1995 Aum Shinrikyō incident. This chapter also explores how individual narratives connected with that incident come into conflict with public “collective” narratives disseminated through the mass media, and how that conflict is exposed through Murakami’s nonfictional writing on the subject.

Cultural commentary has always been an important part of a newspaper’s offering to its readers. Book, theatre and film reviews provide an essential reader service, and form part of a nation’s cultural conversation about itself and its values. Arts criticism in the mainstream press has until recently been dominated by a privileged, often Oxbridge-educated and male elite of ‘amateur’ journalists from the arts world, many having been novelists themselves. More recently, arts pages are more likely to be edited by professional journalists. Newspaper books pages contain fewer reviews of ‘difficult’ or academic books than they did in the mid-twentieth century; instead contain more reviews of celebrity memoir and ‘pop’ histories. This is partly because the number of books reviewed in mainstream newspapers and arts journals has decreased significantly since the mid-1980s; reviews having been replaced with features such as books ‘hit parades’ and interviews with celebrity novelists and directors.

This chapter explores literary responses to the late 1960s crisis in participatory professionalism, provoked by the period’s race riots and by conservatives’ successful appropriation of liberal poverty discourse. The chapter focuses on two texts that address the Community Action Program: Joyce Carol Oates’s them and Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. While these texts voice opposing political positions, both distrust white liberal efforts to speak for the ghetto, drawing on traditions of urban writing (naturalism and literary journalism) that resist the process imperative to break down barriers between author, audience, and lower-class subject matter. At the same time, both writers complicate their literary objectivity by incorporating aspects of the very participatory professionalism they seek to delimit.

It has been an article of faith in Mandelstam studies that he conceived an early antagonism for Soviet life and became an outcast. This chapter surveys the political language of journalism and poetry from 1918 until the collision with Stalin in 1934. Combining literary analysis, biography, and a forensic survey of his publishing record, it analyses his ideological positions. The profile of the writer in this revisionist account is of commitment to cultural revolution and professional involvement. In the late 1920s as the Proletarian movement and class warfare became entrenched, he sought to establish his credentials as a writer ‘made’ by the revolution, courting controversy at the end of New Economic Policy with views on state-sponsored translation as a tool of progress. His defence of expertise as the right means to enlighten cut across political trends, leading to a clash with fellow writers and Stalin.

This chapter considers works of literary journalism, including Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil's Highway, Rubén Martínez’s, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, and Sonia Nazario’s, Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother. It argues that these accounts seek to counter the strident narrative of immigration as a threat to the existence of the nation by offering alternative narratives in which undocumented people are not imagined, first and foremost, as “aliens.” These texts offer counterdiscourses, reframing the story of immigration in terms that shift the focus from the borders of “our” imagined community to construct alternative notions of ethical communities. The texts employ rhetorical strategies that can be understood through Bakhtinian notions of empathy and exotopy. The narratives solicit readers both to empathize with the subjects of their narrative and to move back to their own subject positions as positions of difference—since only from our own subject positions can meaningful ethical action be undertaken. Nonetheless, these texts are also potentially constrained by the degree to which they reinstate a troubling politics of place that diffuses a sense of urgency and crisis needing address.

This chapter examines changes in both the profession of authorship and the publishing trade in Britain the nineteenth century. It charts the tension between conflicting concepts of authorship and developments in intellectual property and literary journalism under three headings: ‘Novelists and literary property’, concerning copyright in theory and practice; ‘Novelists as journalists’, on the interface between periodical publication and literary production; and, finally, ‘The novel of the author’, regarding the incorporation of themes and scenes of authorship and publishing into works of fiction themselves.

This chapter argues that criticism should shed its overly academic habits and borrow some of the techniques of serious literary journalism. It also argues for the public obligation of critical work, as well as explaining the framework of the essays in the rest of the book.

This essay reviews the book The Longest Day, by Cornelius Ryan. Published in 1959, The Longest Day is an account of D-Day, the first day of the World War II invasion of Normandy. The book was a success, earning rave reviews and sales that, within a few years, would stretch into the tens of millions in eighteen different languages. And yet, in latter-day journalistic circles, The Longest Day is an afterthought—a book remembered not for spawning a revolution but for its film adaptation of the same title. It was reissued in 1994 for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. It still sells—a fact that belies the glaring omission of Ryan's work from so many anthologies of literary journalism.

T. S. Eliot’s early criticism is, notoriously, marked by various forms of calculated outrageousness. This chapter maps the fine line that Eliot treads in his reviewing between offending and seducing his readers as he seeks not just to recommend, but also to model, a more rigorous and probing form of criticism than that normally to be found in the literary journalism of the time. It concentrates on the review-essays he wrote for the Athenaeum in 1919–20, the work which announced his arrival as a significant critical voice in literary London. It shows how the various characteristics of Eliot’s early critical prose—its ability to seem deeply scholarly though not in the least academic, its allusiveness, its appeal to self-evidence in the use of quotations—served, in effect, to discriminate among the various publics for such writing, where he avowedly aimed both to ‘stimulate the reflective’ and to ‘vex the thoughtless’.

Dwivedi’s attempt to sway his public through verbal and visual rhetoric is the primary focus of Chapter 1. Resorting to scaremongering and sensationalism, Dwivedi issues a variety of warnings concerning the fate of Hindi via a series of satirical literary cartoons. His concepts for the cartoons convey a literary-visual narrative in which obstacles to Hindi loom large and, unless appropriate measures are taken, foretell its doom. Dwivedi reproaches self-serving editors, dated patrons, foolhardy critics, and pandering authors; he also identifies specific adversaries to Hindi’s advancement both within and outside his field of influence. The cartoons vividly convey Dwivedi’s vision of a disparate Hindi public riddled by threats and his preferred agenda for progress. They represent a pioneering experiment in influencing public literary sentiment via a multimedia rhetorical strategy and signal the beginning of a new era in which Hindi literature moves forward in direct collaboration with visual content.

This chapter examines how novels in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific were reviewed and publicized, and how readerships were informed and created. Literary journalism in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific varies according to the populations, histories, and communications infrastructure of each location. In general, a common pattern has been initial evaluations of work against British and European, then latterly American, models, during which time commentators promoted local writing and sketched national ideals for an independent artistic expression. The chapter considers how book reviews were undertaken, as well as the role of reviewers, in newspapers, magazines, literary journals, academic periodicals, and on radio and television programmes. It shows that all the emergent national literatures in English functioned in an increasingly transnational space in the four nations from the 1950s, first under the rubric of Commonwealth literature and then as postcolonial literatures.

Introduction: a description of Murakami’s transformation from Japanese novelist into a “global” writer, and the establishment of the idea of inner “narrative” (monogatari) as the linguistic, psychological, and mythological grounding for reality, mind, and culture.

Epilogue: a brief discussion of some of Murakami’s activities beyond fiction, including his writing of travelogues, literary guide books, and particularly his work as a translator. The purpose of this brief closing is to offer a more comprehensive view of Murakami not merely as novelist, but as a master of words.

Chapter Three: a description of the mythological tropes seen in Murakami fiction, and how these relate both to the psychological themes seen in Chapter Two, and the linguistic structures in Chapter One. This chapter also explores how a kind of hybrid mythology is constructed in the Murakami world, used to examine the confrontation between “fate/destiny” and “free will.”