[a. F. feuilleton, f. feuillet, dim. of feuille leaf.] 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.
1845. Athenæum, 11 Jan., 42/2. The tendency of the newspaper feuilleton, in France, to absorb the entire literature of the day, has been the subject of very earnest remonstrances by a portion of the press of that country, to which personal considerations have recently added bitterness.
1861. The Saturday Review, XII. 16 Dec., 621/1. Taken separately, the Causeries de Quinzaine have the usual merits of French feuilletons. They are generally written in a lively manner, give some information, and point out the source of more.
1863. Macm. Mag., VII. March, 394/2. Most of the journals [Russian] are furnished with a feuilleton in the shape of a romance, either original, or translated from some celebrated foreign author.
1887. Pall Mall G., 18 July, 2/2. The Siècle published feuilletons daily on literature, history, fine art, science, and fiction.
1892. The Nation (N.Y.), 16 June, LV. 452/3. Once a week, or oftener, he [Hanslick] writes a feuilleton on current musical topics for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse.
Hence Feuilletonism, aptitude for writing feuilletons; Feuilletonist, a writer of feuilletons; Feuilletonistic a., characteristic of or suitable for a feuilletonist.
1840. Blackw. Mag., XLVIII. Oct., 524. The number of young feuilletonists, of young paragraph-mongers, of young critics and authors of all kinds, is now very considerable in France, and the effect has been, not only to give additional levity to the innate instability of the national character, but also to lower the standard of national literature by the crude and erroneous systems of all kinds propounded through their agency. Ibid. (1843), LIV. Nov., 674/1. From this vast repertory of all that is horrid and grotesque—more horrid on account of its grotesqueness—the feuilletonists, or short story-tellers, are not indisposed to draw.
1885. C. Lowe, Bismarck, II. x. 42. The Count returned to the charge, and worried his Chief with what the latter called ‘feuilletonistic’ remarks about the difficulties of his social and diplomatic position in Paris.
1888. R. Y. Tyrrell, The Old School of Classics and the New, in Fortn. Rev., XLIII. Jan., 59. I am far from averring that all this world would be set right if men turned to their grammars and dictionaries once more, and refrained from dignifying Schliemannism and spade-lore, feuilletonism, dilettantism, and sciolism with the name of scholarship.
