Paratexts and the French press of the fin de siècle: a case for meta-literary journalism

This article combines elements of reader-response praxes to unveil early French press examples of a “meta” literary journalism – a reportage literature self-referentially actuated by and through its relation to its paratexts. Drawing on Hayden White’s concept of metahistory and Gérard Genette’s theory of the paratext, it explores how what is situated around a text in the newspaper can influence how that text is seen, read and interpreted. It focuses on the appearance (visual and sequential) in the French daily press of two works written at the time of the Second Anglo–Boer War (Hobhouse’s Report and Carrère’s La guerre du Transvaal) in connection to the serial publications of two roman-feuilletons (Marjolaine and L’Enfant des boers), examining how the compositional tropology of and paratextual typography around both reportage texts were reinforced by fictional and nonfictional paratexts to spread anti-imperialistic messages in the French dailies of the fin de siècle.