This chapter argues that thinking about Roberto Bolaño in the context of journalism and mass culture means recognizing how mainstays of globalized twentieth-century journalistic communication – photographic realism, reportage with a pretension of objectivity, investigative journalism – as well as discourses about literature, have circulated differently in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Explores in particular the convergences and divergences between Latin American and Spanish crónicas and North American New Journalism in Bolaño’s fiction and in his own newspaper writing, the essay argues that Bolaño’s portrayal of the daily cultural and political contexts one confronts in the newspaper reflects his suggestion that readers are always exiles, and that they produce a commentary on seeing as both a journalistic practice and a metaphor for social understanding. Bolaño draws on, but also rewrites, the history of literary journalism in a wider Atlantic world, even as he comments on the superficiality of mass media and culture. Discussing Bolaño’s engagement with cronistas such as Rubén Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Carlos Monsiváis, and Pedro Lemebel, the chapter includes discussions of 2666, Los detectives salvajes, Bolaño’s short stories, and articles he wrote for newspapers and magazines in Spain and Chile.

Chapter 3 examines how transatlantic fiction about dinosaurs shaped notions of national potency at a key moment in US and British history. The first half focuses on two American interstellar romances whose violent protagonists vanquish dinosaurs on evolutionarily backward planets. J. J. Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) has them conquering Jupiter’s dinosaurs before heading to a Christianised Saturn and learning about the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race’s spiritual evolution, while in Gustavus Pope’s Journey to Venus (1895) they subdue prehistoric Venus in an unruly pastiche of palaeontological writing. The chapter’s second half provides alternative perspectives from British authors whose narratives, all published in 1899, allude to the ongoing search for giant dinosaurs in the American West as a way of reflecting on nation, empire, and masculinity. Henry Hering’s short story ‘Silas P. Cornu’s Divining-Rod’ ridicules the avarice of the US tycoons who fuelled the dinosaur ‘rush’, while C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent and Frank Savile’s Beyond the Great South Wall have encounters with giant brontosaurs reinvigorating men’s imperialistic masculinity in over-civilised societies.

Chapter one provides a case study of Henry Neville Hutchinson, a frequently overlooked figure who was not only the most important early populariser of American dinosaurs but also a proponent of using imaginative literature to widen the mass public’s access to science. An unbeneficed British clergyman without a formal scientific position, Hutchinson aired his views both in popular journalism and in books on palaeontology like Extinct Monsters (1892). His writings often contradicted the views of palaeontological authorities. This chapter argues that palaeontologists who read Hutchinson’s democratising works with concern responded by fashioning clearer distinctions between true science and work that was popularisation or romance. In 1894 British palaeontologist Harry Seeley described Hutchinson’s writing as ‘literature rather than science’. As Fallon demonstrates, Seeley’s response also undermined Hutchinson’s popularisation of the previously obscure word ‘dinosaur’, which Seeley believed to be a misleading term wrongly emphasised by American researchers. Subsequently, Fallon shows how Hutchinson’s controversial attempt to publish a paper on the American dinosaur Diplodocus for the specialist Geological Magazine led him to criticise the secularity and complex style of conventional scientific articles. Hutchinson’s career exemplifies the concerns of this book.

For Mailer, the 1960s were not only notable for the volume of his published writing, but for the extent of his political engagement and participation. Though Mailer wrote and spoke about American politics until the end of his life, he was arguably most directly involved in political protest during the Vietnam War era. During this time, he spoke out frequently against the war, and in 1967 published the stylistically innovative Why Are We In Vietnam?, often read as an allegorical criticism of the national mindset that led to America’s involvement in the unwinnable war. Most notably, Mailer participated in the March on the Pentagon in October of 1967, which provided the foundation for his Pulitzer Prize winning work Armies of the Night (1968), a seminal work of New Journalism that to this day is considered one of the best pieces covering the event.

In the summer of 1968, Mailer covered the Republican and Democratic conventions in Miami and Chicago, respectively. In this work, as in Armies of the Night, Mailer employs the literary tactics of New Journalism, and includes himself as a character in the narrative. Yet the Mailer of Miami and the Siege of Chicago is different from the Mailer of The Armies of the Night. In addition to providing the historical and political context for the publication of this work, this chapter will discuss the shift in Mailer’s level of involvement, enthusiasm, and support for the protests that erupted in Chicago.

This chapter discusses Mailer’s work in the context of the New Journalism movement, including his own unique contributions in terms of style and perspective. It explores the ways Mailer blends characteristics of autobiography, participatory journalism, and literary fiction, and also addresses Mailer’s use of illeism, a style which allowed him to write about himself in the third person, and which became one of his signatures as a New Journalist in the 1960s and 1970s.

Focusing on the major writings of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, this chapter argues that the interpretative horizon of their works is inextricable from the emergence of modern conservatism as a cultural and electoral force. Whereas movement conservatives in the 1950s tended to stress tradition-based hierarchies and organic social order over abstract theories of individual liberty, conservatives began to shift their emphasis in the mid-sixties toward the language of unadulterated patriotism, property rights, and colorblind individualism. In this next stage of their movement, conservatives embraced an ideologically rigid fusion of laissez-faire capitalism and cultural populism that would redirect perceptions of literary value and prestige within American conservatism toward certain conservative strands of New Journalism and, in later years, toward the one-dimensionality of mass-market genre fiction. Finally, conservatives emphasized the “liberal cultural elite” trope with renewed vigor, constructing a monolithic stereotype of white liberal intellectuals whose racial guilt fueled their appetite for difficult, morally complex literature, a form of moral masochism that conveniently helped those same white liberals accrue “hip” cultural capital.

When Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history” as the Cold War ended, he suggested that the teleology of historical progression had passed and that Western-style liberal democracy had prevailed. Postmodern American novelists, however, have portrayed not history’s end but its rebirth as a form of interrogation and reinvention. Recognizing that new technologies for instant representation (radio, television, the internet) have altered both our sense of history and the practice of history, postmodern writers treat history as something happening and being created in the present moment. Like currency, history becomes fungible. Consequently, received versions of history no longer have the same power. They are subject to exchange. It is not precisely that history has always been lies but rather fictions in which people may choose to believe. Writers such as Toni Morrison or Joan Didion write alternative versions of history that critique received exceptionalist, racist American ones. On the other hand, in the era of climate change, the “end of history” has taken on an apocalyptic valence as writers such as Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Kurt Vonnegut portray the end of history as the beginning of the Anthropocene era: truly the end of history.