ABSTRACT
Reportage and literature have had an uncomfortable relationship. They have often been thought of as mutually exclusive. Literature, as represented in university courses, has traditionally consisted of fiction, poetry and drama. Its binding characteristic is held to be that it is ‘imaginative’ – that is, not true. There are some exceptions to this rule. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, for example, and the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, though works of reportage, have been granted literary rank. But generally speaking reportage, in the sense of eyewitness reporting, has been associated with the rise of the news media, dating from the late nineteenth century, and allocated an inferior cultural status.
