No bibliographical list can account for the wide variety of scholarship in the growing field of literary and narrative journalism. This list simply reflects scholarship I consulted directly for this site. You can also consult the citations in the Notes to each chapter, and in specific entires in the Glossary Section.
Necessarily, as well, this list reflects the fact that my interest is primarily in long form journalism published in English, in the U.S. In that regard, I should mention that, since the original first-edition of Reading Narrative Journalism ten years ago, a very fine scholarly collection surveying this field has been published: The Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism, edited by William E. Dow and Roberta S. Maguire (New York and London: Routledge: 2020). Dow and Maguire’s volume contains many valuable essays overviews, as well as extensive bibliographies for each chapter.
A list of my own publications can be found here.
A list of primary texts referred to on this site can be found here.
General Aids
- Web Resources and Bibliographies
- A shorter list of Scholarly Articles on Narrative Journalism: Good Places for Students to Start
- Authors on Video Talking about Narrative Journalism
Resources Used for or Referred to On This Site
Aare, Ceceilia. “A Narratalogical Approach to Literary Journalism…” LIterary Journalism Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 106-39, excellent analysis of narrative modes and point of view.
Alexander, Robert. “‘My Story is Always Escaping into Other People’: Subjectivity, Objectivity, and the Double in American Literary Journalism,” Literary Journalism Studies 1, no 1 (Spring 2009): 57-66.
__________. “‘The Right Kind of Eyes’: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a Novel of Journalistic Development,” Literary Journalism Studies 4.1 (2012): 19-36, an examination of Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo journalism.
Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language, Trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986): 141-148., foundational to discussions of realism.
Boynton, Robert S. ed. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). Interviews from a range of U.S. based narrative journalists.
Brewin, Mark W. “A Short History of the History of Objectivity,” The Communication Review 16, no. 4 (2013): 211–29.
Clark, Roy Peter. “The False Dichotomy and Narrative Journalism,”Nieman Reports 15 Sept. 2000, useful as a trade-centered account of “the story.”
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), on ethnography and its own genres.
__________ . and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986), on anthropolgoy and how it is written.
Cramer, Janet M. and Michael McDevitt, “Ethnographic Journalism,” Qualitative Research in Journalism: Taking It to the Streets (ed. Sharon Hartin Iorio (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 127-43.
D’Agata, John and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), a famous text in the fact-fiction debates.
Dow, William. “James Agee’s ‘Continual Awareness,’ Untold Stories: ‘Saratoga Springs’ and ‘Havana Cruise’ (1937).” Literary Journalism across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences. Eds., John Bak and Bill Reynolds. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011: 225-237.
__________. “Reading Otherwise: Literary Journalism as an Aesthetic Narrative Cosmopolitanism.” Keynote Address. Eleventh International Conference for Literary Journalism Studies. Porto Alegre, Brazil, May 19, 2016. Literary Journalism Studies 8, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 119–36.
Dowling, David O. “Beyond the Program Era: Tracy Kidder, John D’Agata and the Rise of Literary Journalism at Iowa” Literary Journalism Studies, 8.1 (2016): 52-77. How narrative journalism has been incorporated into a famous MFA program.
__________.“Toward a New Aesthetic of Digital Literary Journalism: Charting the Fierce Evolution of the ‘Supreme Nonfiction’.” Literary Journalism Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 100–16.
Eason, David. “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 51-65.
Forde, Kathy Roberts. Literary Journalism on Trial (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), a discussion of Janet Malcolm’s trials.
Frus, Phyllis, The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), a classic study of modernist realism and more.
Giles, Fiona, and Georgia Hitch. “Multimedia Features as ‘Narra-descriptive’ Texts: Exploring the Relationship between Literary Journalism and Multimedia.” Literary Journalism Studies 9, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 74–91.
Gordon, Maggie. “Appropriation of Generic Convention: Film as Paradigm in Michael Herr’s Dispatches,” Literature/Film Quarterly 28 (2000): 16-27, very useful on film genres Herr appropriated.
Greenberg, Susan. “Slow Journalism.” Prospect, February 26, 2007. https://www. prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/slowjournalism.
———. “Slow Journalism in the Digital Fast Lane.” In Global Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Imagination, edited by Richard Lance Keeble and John Tulloch, 381–93. New York: Peter Lang, 2013.
Hartsock, John C. Literary Journalism and the Aesthetics of Experience (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2015), considered by many a foundational texts on genres of literary journalism and reader experience.
Harvers, Frank and Marcel Broersma, “Between engagement and ironic ambiguity: Mediating subjectivity in narrative journalism,” Journalism (2014), vol. 15 (5): 639-54.
Hermann, Anne Kirstine, “The Temporal Tipping Point: Regimentation, Representation and Reorientation in Ethnographic Journalism,” Journalism Practice 10, no. 4 (2016): 492-506, considering time and temporality in journalism’s kinship to anthropology.
Jackson, Gregory S. “Cultivating Spiritual Sight: Jacob Riis’s Virtual-Tour Narrative and the Visual Modernization of Protestant Homiletics,” Representations (Summer 2003): 126-166, about the intersection of Christianity and journalism in Riis’s account of poverty.
Joseph, Sue and Richard Lance Keeble, eds. Profile Pieces: Journalism and the “Human Interest” Bias (New York: Routledge, 2016.
Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosensteil. The Elements of Journalism (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001), terrific especially for its discussion of objectivity.
Larkin, Emma. Finding George Orwell in Burma (New York: Penguin, 2005), a fine discussion of colonialism and totalitarianism.
Lutes, Jean-Marie. Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006, excellent on “sob sister” and sensational journalism.
MacDonald, Dwight. “John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima,’” Politics 3:10:308 (Oct 1946), a complaint about its realism and its narrative point of view.
Manoff, Robert Karl. “Telling the News By Writing The Story,” in Manoff and Michael Schudson, eds. Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
McCarthy, Mary. Letter to the Editor, Politics 3:10: 367 (Nov. 1946), also about Hersey’s Hiroshima.
Morris, Errol. A Wilderness of Error (New York: Penguin, 2012), also about Janet Malcolm.
Orvell, Miles. “Weegee’s Voyeurism and the Mastery of Urban Disorder,”American Art, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1992): 18-41, a fine source on tabloid journalism and photography.
Packer, George. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. (New York: FSG, 2013), a contemporary nonfiction novel modelled on John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy.
Pauly, John (2014), “The New Journalism and the Struggle for Interpretation.” Journalism, vol. 15, no. 5 (2014): 589-604, very useful on the rise of “interpretive journalism.”
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), helpful on travel writing and colonial imagery.
Randall, Margaret. “Reclaiming Voices: Notes on a New Female Practice in Journalism,” Latin American Perspectives 18 (Summer 1981): 103-113, a rationale for testimonial journalism.
Roberts, William, and Fiona Giles. “Mapping Nonfiction Narrative: A New Theoretical Approach to Analyzing Literary Journalism.” Literary Journalism Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 100–117, considers the idea of ethnographic realism and its alternatives.
Roiland, Josh. “Getting Away From It All: The Literary Journalism of David Foster Wallace and Nietzsche’s concept of Oblivion,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel S. Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012)
Schmidt, Thomas R. Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2019), excellent on the integration of story-telling advisors into U.S. newsrooms.
Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2011), an incisive text on the boundary between fiction and fact.
Sigg, Pascal. “The Disclosure of Difference: Literary Journalism and the Postmodern“. Dow, William and Roberta Maguire (eds.), Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism. Routledge, New York, 2020, considers narrative point of view and “disclosure” of experimental intentions.
—–“Witnessing and the Theorization of Reportage“. Alexander, Robert and Will McDonald (eds.). Literary Journalism and Social Justice. New York: Springer, 2022
Sims, Norman and Mark Kramer, Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995).
Stone, Albert E. “Collaboration in Contemporary American Autobiography,” Revue Française D’Etudes Américaines 14 (May 1982): 151-65.
Tuchman, Gaye. “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity,” Journal of American Sociology 77, no. 4 (1972): 660–79.
White, Hayden. “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23 (Feb. 1984): 1-33, a foundational theoretical text on the ideas of story and narrative.
Yagoda, Ben. About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000)
__________ . “Fact Checking ‘In Cold Blood,’” in Slate 20 March 2013, and still available online.
Yerkes, Andrew C. “’A Biology of Dictatorships”: Liberalism and Realism in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here,” Studies in the Novel 42 (2010), offers a fine discussion of literary realism.
Zarsosa, Augustin. “Melodrama and the Modes of the World.” Discourse 32 (Spring 2010): 326-255, very useful on sensationalism, melodrama, and the idea of the mode.
Zelizer, Barbie. “On ‘Having Been There’: ‘Eyewitnessing’ as a Journalistic Key Word.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 5 (December 2007): 408–28, tells us much about what to “witness” means to journalism.