Feuilleton is a French diminutive of feuillet, the leaf of a book. Joseph Roth’s (a journalist who illuminated the early days of Nazism) speciality was a now vanished newspaper form called the feuilleton, in which favoured writers would shine bright and intensely literary flashlights into corners of metropolitan existence. The last practitioners of this style expired about 15 years ago in the ‘Talk of the Town’ section of that most European of publications, the New Yorker.

As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, a feuilleton is

In French newspapers (or others in which the French custom is followed), a portion of one or more pages (at the bottom) marked off from the rest of the page by a rule, and appropriated to light literature, criticism, etc.; an article or work printed in the feuilleton.

Feuilleton will be taking the following two quotations as its contextual foundation: 

“The Siècle published feuilletons daily on literature, history, fine art, science, and fiction” (Pall Mall Gazette, 18 July 1887, 2/2)  

“The tendency of the newspaper feuilleton, in France, to absorb the entire literature of the day” (Athenæum,  11 January 1845,  42)  

The feuilleton was disparaged by the serious press of 19th century Britain for its superficiality. As when R. Y. Tyrrel complained: 

“If men refrained from dignifying‥feuilletonism‥with the name of scholarship” (Fornightly Review, January 1888, 59)  

But, at Feuilleton, we will play with this Victorian British definition and dedicate ourselves to the criticism and culture of the day.