| Description |
1 online resource : illustrations |
| Contents |
What is an essay? Thirteen answers from Virginia Woolf / Thomas Karshan -- The Montaignian essay and authored miscellanies from antiquity to the nineteenth century / Warren Boutcher -- Of sticks and stones: the essay, experience, and experiment / Kathryn Murphy -- Time and the essay: The Spectator and diurnal form / Markman Ellis -- The sociable philosopher: David Hume and the philosophical essay / Fred Parker -- Tristram Shandy, essayist / Scott Black -- On coffee-houses, smoking, and the English essay tradition / Denise Gigante -- The romantic essay and the city / Gregory Dart -- Charles Lamb, Elia, and essays in familiarity / Felicity James -- Carlyle, Emerson, and the voiced essay / Tom F. Wright -- Retiring or engaging: politics in the English essay / Ophelia Field -- Things said by the way: Walter Pater and the essay / Stefano Evangelista -- 'Strips of essayism': Eliot, Hardy, and the Victorian periodical essay / Bharat Tandon -- Rational distortions: essayism in the British novel after Borges / Michael Wood -- Creative nonfiction and the lyric essay: the American essay in the twenty-first century / Ned Stuckey-French -- Up to a point: the psychoanalyst and the essay / Adam Phillips -- Dalí's Montaigne: essay hybrids and surrealist practice / Christy Wampole |
| Summary |
"What is an essay, and how did the essay emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and surprising emergences across its history, from Montaigne’s 1580 Essais to the present? This volume assembles seventeen essays which address patterns and oddities in the history of the genre, paying attention both to the transformed legacies of the earliest essayists across the centuries, and to the form’s contemporary vibrancy. Contributors, both scholars and essayists, draw out paradoxes of what is considered the fourth genre, often overshadowed in literary history and criticism by fiction, poetry, and drama. The essay is at once a pedagogical tool, and a refusal of the technical languages of universities and professions; politically engaged but retired and independent; erudite and anti-pedantic; occasional and enduring; intimate and oratorical; allusive and idiosyncratic. The volume shows the essay as an ambassador between philosophy and public life, learnedness and experience. Since it is a form of writing against which academic work has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little scholarship on the history of the essay. On Essays addresses this dearth, not as a history or companion, but through a series of studies of major themes across the history of the genre"--Publisher's description |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Description based on online resource; title from web page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed on October 23, 2020) |
| Subject |
English essays -- History and criticism
|
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American essays -- History and criticism
|
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American essays
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English essays
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| Genre/Form |
Electronic books
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| Author |
Karshan, Thomas, editor
|
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Murphy, Kathryn, editor
|
| ISBN |
9780191082115 |
|
9780198707868 |
|
0191082112 |
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9780191017537 |
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0191017531 |
|
9780191779008 |
|
0191779008 |
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019870786X |
|
