The Cambridge history of the American essay / edited by Christy Wampole, Jason Childs.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Wampole, Christy, 1977- editor.

Childs, Jason (Independent scholar), editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American essays--History and criticism.

American essays.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xviii, 718 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Summary:

From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

Contents:

Essays to do good : Puritanism and the birth of the American essay / Jan Stievermann

Prattlers, meddlers, bachelors, busy-bodies : the periodical essay in the eighteenth century / Richard Squibbs

The federalist and the founders / Matthew Garrett

American nature writing : 1700-1900 / Noah Rawlings

The essay and transcendentalism/ Laura Dassow Walls

Old world shadows in the new : Europe and the nineteenth-century American essay / Philip Coleman

Poet-essayists and magazine culture in the nineteenth century / John Michael

Antebellum women essayists / Charlene Avallone

Writing freedom before and after emancipation / Kinohi Nishikawa

Social justice and the American essay / Christy Wampole

"Zones of contention" in the genteel essay / Jenny Spinner

The American comic essay / David E.E. Sloane

Nineteenth-century American travel essays : aesthetics, modernity, and national identity / Brigitte Bailey

American pragmatism : an essayistic conception of truth / Jonathan Levin

The essay in the Harlem renaissance / Shawn Anthony Christian

The southern agrarians and the new criticism / Sarah E. Gardner

Subjective and objective : newspapers columns / William E. Dow

The experience of art : the essay in visual culture / Tom Huhn

The essay in American music / Kyle Gann

The essay and the twentieth-century literary magazine / Eleni Theodoropoulos

Germans in Amerika : written possibility, uninhabitable reality / Florian Fuchs

The essay and the American left / Andrea Capra

The native American essay / Hertha D. Sweet Wong

Conservatism and the essay / Jeffrey R. Dudas

Opinions and decisions : legal essays / Peter Goodrich

World War Two to #MeToo : the personal and the political in the American feminist essay / Ellena Savage

Self-portraits in a convex mirror : the essay in American poetry / Lucy Alford

The American essay and (social) science / Ted Anton

Philosophy as a kind of writing / Paul Jenner

The essay and literary postmodernism : seriousness and exhaustion / Stefano Ercolino

The American essay film : a neglected genre / Nora M. Alter

Literary theory, criticism, and the essay / Carolina Iribarren

Gender, queerness, and the American essay / David Lazar

Disability and the American essay / Anne Finger

The radical hybridity of the lyric essay / Michael Askew

Writing migration : multiculturalism, democracy, and the essay form / Cyrus R.K. Patell

Latinx culture and the essay / Yolanda Padilla

Black experience through the essay / Walton Muyumba

The essay and the anthropocene / David Carlin.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 29 Mar 2024).

ISBN:

9781009080415

1009080415

9781009070041

1009070045

9781009080613

100908061X