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On essays : montaigne to the present / edited by Thomas Karshan, Kathryn Murphy.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Karshan, Thomas, Editor.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- American essays--History and criticism.
- American essays.
- English essays--History and criticism.
- English essays.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (397 pages) : illustrations
- Edition:
- First edition.
- Place of Publication:
- Oxford University Press 2020
- Summary:
- 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?0Sometimes 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.0Perhaps 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:
- On Essays: Montaigne to the Present Introduction: On the Difficulty of Introducing a Work of this Kind 1: What is An Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf 2: The Montaignian Essay and Authored Miscellanies from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century 3: Of Sticks and Stones: The Essay, Experience, and Experiment 4: Time and the Essay: The Spectator and Diurnal Form 5: The Sociable Philosopher: David Hume and the Philosophical Essay 6: Tristram Shandy, Essayist 7: On Coffee-Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition 8: The Romantic Essay and the City 9: Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity 10: Carlyle, Emerson, and the Voiced Essay 11: Retiring or Engaging: Politics in the English Essay 12: Things Said by the Way: Walter Pater and the Essay 13: 'Strips of Essayism': Eliot, Hardy, and the Victorian Periodical Essay 14: Rational Distortions: Essayism in the British Novel after Borges 15: Creative Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay: The American Essay in the Twenty-First Century 16: Up to a Point: The Psychoanalyst and the Essay 17: Dalí's Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on print version record.
- ISBN:
- 0-19-108211-2
- 0-19-177900-8
- 0-19-101753-1
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