British Literary Journalism

Richard Lance Keeble

According to the American media historian and theorist, Michael Schudson, “Reporters make stories. Making is not faking, not lying, but neither is it a passive mechanical recording. It cannot be done without play and imagination.” Such a view lies at the heart of this brief overview of British literary journalism—and it can transform our perceptions of the epistemology, functions, form, and content of journalism. For by stressing the creativity of journalism we can identify it as a specific literary field yet one closely linked to fiction—and the other arts. Too often, journalism and literature in Britain and the United States are seen as two separate spheres (one “low,” the other “high”). And while the British media today exert enormous political, ideological, and cultural power, journalism paradoxically still retains only a precarious position within literary culture and academe. One result is that literary journalism (defined here simply as the journalism of ...

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