The Politics and Poetics of Literary Journalism 2in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night Abstract This paper delineates how the various tropes of literary journalism envision new ways of negotiating the interstice of literature and journalism in a way that challenges the conventions of both genres. The paper limns three interrelated tropes for the new narrative genre. These tropes are the intertextual, the narcissistic, and the autobiographical. Within this framework of the three tropes, 1Mailer’s The Armies of the Night is discussed and analyzed. Through a close analysis of the poetics of literary journalistic narrative, this paper seeks a better understanding of the specific fictional poetics shared by both journalism and literature in Mailer’s text. The Politics and Poetics of Literary Journalism in 2Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night 1. Introduction With the publication of13Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965) and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night (1968), a new hybrid genre emerged to combine the best practices of both fact and fiction, journalism and literature. Mailer’s 3Armies of the Night has received The Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1968. Since then, it has been the focus of a cornucopia of critical investigation as a major work of American nonfiction. Literary journalism has various labels that are used interchangeably. Leonira Flis points out that the “terminological inconsistencies” inherent in this hybrid genre have led critics to employ various