The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall

“In The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall, Cary Hollinshead-Strick creatively reexamines a body of once popular—but since forgotten—vaudeville plays featuring newspapers as characters and props to show how the ‘Fourth Wall’ of the theater represented and critiqued the ‘Fourth Estate’ of the press as both media developed in France under the July Monarchy (1830-1848). With its textured analysis of ‘inter-mediation’ between plays, newspapers, and novels, this study provides a critical and timely reminder of the long and contentious history of ‘new media’ and ‘fake news.' —Christine Haynes, author of Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France 

"With Hollinshead-Strick’s careful guidance, the reader delves into a world of in-jokes and allusions that made these seemingly ephemeral productions quite so piquant for their contemporary audiences. This is genuinely an enjoyable read and Hollinshead-Strick has paid great attention to the staging and presentation of these works as well . . . In short, she gets to the heart of why these productions were so popular to contemporary audiences, and thus why we as scholars need to study them more closely. To this end, her argument that literary history needs to look to the stage as well as the press is particularly important." —Clare Siviter, H-France Review