Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmã(c) to Proust

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In French literature, newspapers have typically had bad press. Throughout the nineteenth century, French poets and novelists depicted the rapid growth of the press as a corrupting behemoth that was swallowing up art and culture. And yet, towards the end of the century, some writers began to take a more ambivalent approach, pivoting between antipathy and enthusiasm for what had become a massified and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon. ’No-one truly escapes from journalism, ’ as Stéphane Mallarmé put it. Rather than cut themselves off from ’universal reportage’, he and other leading modernists, including Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust, came to view newspapers as an essential forum for literary experimentation.

Hustlers in the Ivory Tower explores how the French modernists used newspapers and large-circulation magazines as a ’literary laboratory’ by publishing poetry and imaginative prose in their pages. Drawing on extensive documentary research, this book looks behind the scenes at wrangling and wheeling-dealing between authors, editors, and publishers that drove the rise of modernist literature in France.

These interactions with the press yielded nuanced, self-conscious portrayals of the tensions between journalism and literature in works of modernist poetry and prose that confront their own journalistic hinterland in unprecedented depth. At once a model and a foil, the newspaper emerges in Hustlers in the Ivory Tower as the locus of French literature’s broader struggle to come to terms with modernity.

Max McGuinness is a Teaching Fellow in French at Trinity College Dublin and a theatre critic for The Financial Times.