On essays : Montaigne to the present /

On essays : Montaigne to the present /

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Bibliographic Details
Edition:First published in paperback
Imprint:Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021.
Description:xvi, 380 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Language:English
Subject:
English essays -- History and criticism.
American essays -- History and criticism.
American essays
English essays
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12595199
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:Karshan, Thomas, editor.
Murphy, Kathryn, editor.
ISBN:9780192848611
019870786X
9780198707868
9780191779008
9780191017537
0192848615
Notes:First published 2020
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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.
Review by Choice Review

How to define a genre best defined by what it is not? In the first essay of this important work on the origins and evolution of the essay, Karshan (Univ. of East Anglia, UK) imagines a conversation in which the essay, asked to define itself, calls such a question "impertinent" and answers "only with a shrug offered in retreat" (p. 31). This image of the essay coyly retreating to protect its right to remain unpredictable lies at the heart of this clever, erudite book, in which 17 distinguished scholars focus on authors as different as Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine. Ordered chronologically by author examined, essays highlight the originality of specific writers while revealing patterns of "family resemblance": experimentation, ambiguity of intention, avoidance of closure. From the deliberately digressive literary "ramblings" of Montaigne to the intimate reflections of the Romantics and the genre-bending, photo and video, text-image hybrids of the present, the essay comes across as a brilliantly amorphous form that shows the human mind working not in rational discourse but in rich, inchoate images. Original research, innovative analysis, and clear writing make this ode to the essay an exemplary piece of scholarship. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Cynthia B. Kerr, Vassar College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review

The Janice Trimble Book Fund bookplate

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