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Full Description
Montaigne called it a ramble; Chesterton the joke of literature; and Hume an ambassador between the worlds of learning and of conversation. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and contradictions across its history, from Montaigne's 1580 Essais through the familiar intimacies of the Romantic essay, and up to more recent essayists such as Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine?
Sometimes called the fourth genre, the essay has been over-shadowed in literary history by fiction, poetry, and drama, and has proved notoriously resistant to definition. On Essays reveals in the essay a pattern of paradox: at once a pedagogical tool and a refusal of the methodical languages of universities and professions; politically engaged but retired and independent; erudite and anti-pedantic; occasional and enduring; intimate and oratorical; allusive and idiosyncratic.
Perhaps because it is a form of writing against which literary scholarship has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little work on the tradition of the essay. Neither a comprehensive history nor a student companion, On Essays is a series of seventeen elegantly written essays on authors and aspects in the history of the genre - essays which, taken together, form the most substantial book yet published on the essay in Britain and America.
Contents
Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy: Introduction: On the difficulty of introducing a work of this kind
1: Thomas Karshan: What is an Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf
2: Warren Boutcher: The Montaignian Essay and Authored Miscellanies from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century
3: Kathryn Murphy: Of Sticks and Stones: The Essay, Experience, and Experiment
4: Markman Ellis: Time and the Essay: The Spectator and Diurnal Fomr
5: Fred Parker: The Sociable Philosopher: David Hume and the Philosophical Essay
6: Scott Black: Tristram Shandy, Essayist
7: Denise Gigante: On Coffee Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition
8: Gregory Dart: The Romantic Essay and the City
9: Felicity James: Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity
10: Tom Wright: Carlyle, Emerson, and the Voiced Essay
11: Ophelia Field: Retiring or Engaging: Politics in the English Essay
12: Stefano Evangelista: Things Said By The Way: Walter Pater and the Essay
13: Bharat Tandon: 'Strips of Essayism': Eliot, Hardy, and the Victorian Periodical Essay
14: Michael Wood: Rational Distortions: Essays in the British Novel After Borges
15: Ned Stuckey-French: Creative Non-Fiction and the Lyric Essay: The American Essay in the Twenty-First Century
16: Adam Phillips: Up To A Point: The Psychoanalyst and the Essay
17: Christy Wampole: Dalí's Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice
