‘A Simulacrum of Power’: Intimacy and Abstraction in the Rhetoric of the New Journalism (original) (raw)

2000

Abstract

In his autobiography, published in 1884, Edmund Yates, then editor of The World, claimed to have invented ‘that style of “personal” journalism which is so very much to be deprecated and so enormously popular’ (Yates 1884, 1 278). The date given for this event is precise — 30 June 1855 — as is its location, in an article for Henry Vizetelly’s Illustrated Times, entitled ‘The Lounger at The Clubs’. However one might judge the accuracy of Yates’s (characteristically self-promotional) claim, it serves to introduce both a significant shift in the history of journalistic practices and the terms in which this shift was commonly understood. By his use of the phrase ‘“personal” journalism’, Yates offers a means of characterizing a form of popular journalistic discourse which extended, with a certain continuity, from the mid-nineteenth century to the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1880s and beyond.1 Conversely, when recalling a later moment in his career, he accounts for the refusal of J. T. Delane,...

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