Feuilleton (a diminutive of French feuillet, the leaf of a book) was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers. Its inventors were Julien Louis Geoffroy and Bertin the Elder, editors of the Journal des Débats. It was not usually printed on a separate sheet, but merely separated from the political part of the newspaper by a line, and printed in smaller type. In French newspapers it consisted chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles.

Besides France, Russia in particular cultivated the feuilleton genre since the 19th century, and the word acquired the general meaning of satirical piece in the Russian language.

The feuilleton in its French sense was never adopted by English newspapers, though the sort of matter represented by it eventually came to be included. But the term itself entered English use to indicate the installment of a serial story printed in one part of a newspaper. However the French form is quite popular in Continental Europe, as seen in the works of many popular Czech authors, such as Jan Neruda, Karel Čapek and Ludvík Vaculík.

In the novel The Glass Bead Game, by Nobel Prize winning novelist Hermann Hesse, the current era is characterised and described as The Age of the Feuilleton.

Bibliography

• Dianina, Katia. "The Feuilleton: An Everyday Guide to Public Culture in the Age of the Great Reforms,", The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 187-210.
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

---

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "Feuilleton". Image Credit.

bookmark   email   print   tweet   facebook