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Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time
The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay.
From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form.
This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.
From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form.
This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.
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333 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 31, 2018
As an essayist, I find it somewhat striking that I have long written essays without stopping to think about what other essayists have said about them. Although like many young people I had to write a lot of papers that were given the name of essays even though they were not essays in the way that essayists consider it, unlike many people I kept on writing them for fun as a way of expressing the way my mind worked and the subjects that caught my fancy when I was no longer required to do so for academic purposes. For whatever reason, the tensions and contradictions of the essay have long appealed to me, and as a somewhat self-absorbed person who was fascinated by the workings of my own mind and somehow of the (often mistaken) belief that other people were interested in it as well, the essay has long been something I have practiced, like the people in this book. If you too are someone who appreciates writing essays, then you will likely appreciate the rather meta achievement of this book in providing collections of essays written by essayists on the essay as a genre.
It should be noted that this particular collection of books has a wide variety of excellent and generally (although not universally) accomplished essayists. The essays begin with selections from the work of Michel de Montaigne, who is considered to be the father of the essay and responsible for its development in early modern Western civilization, along with essays by William Cornwallis and Francis Bacon from the early seventeenth century. Moving on to eighteenth century essayists we have Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson represented for their writings. The nineteenth century has more essayists included, namely William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander Smith, Walter Pater, and Agnes Repplier. Consistent with the presentist bias of most literary collections, though, it is little surprise that the vast majority of essayists included are from the twentieth century: William Dean Howells, Josè Ortega y Gasset, A.C. Benson, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Musil, G.K. Chesteron, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Walter Murdoch, Enrique Anderson Imbert, Max Bense, Mariano Picón-Slas, Germán Arciniegas, Theodor Adorno, Aldous Huxley, Michael Hamburger, Fernand Ouellette, Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, Edward Hoagland, E.B. White, William H. Gass, Jean Starobinski, Andrè Belleau, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gabriel Zaid, Scott Russell Sanders, Phillip Lopate, Gerald Early, Susan Sontag, Nancy Mairs, Rachel Blau Duplessis, and Cynthia Ozick. The editors even try their hand at some of the essayists of the current century: Vivian Gornick, John D'Agata, Paul Graham, Ander Monson, John Bresland, and Jeff Porter. Alas, none of my essays were included.
Despite the attempts by the author to cast a wide variety of essayists in order to avoid a selection that was too narrowly focused on distinguished European and European-American male writers (which would not have bothered me, but would certainly have made this collection less diverse for those who care about such matters), there are a lot of similarities that run through these essays. Essayists often feel it necessary to defend themselves or defend their genre despite it being somewhat rough around the edges and filled with the inner workings of the author's thinking, and some focus on the need for authenticity and others fret about essayists being self-absorbed and there are continual worries that the essay is dead or dying and that it has been co-opted by the less free article and its commercial and political demands. Yet the essay continues to live on, and although there are discussions of video essays and radio essays as ways that the essay is moving into genres outside of merely textual ones, it is surprising how few people write about blogs and the relationship of blogging to the early periodicals of the eighteenth century as being similarly low barrier of entry areas for writers to explore their chosen topics without the commercial pressure that writers often face. Few ever sought to be rich writing the essay, but in being themselves, many essayists have found themselves quite like other essayists of a diverse tribe of people.
It should be noted that this particular collection of books has a wide variety of excellent and generally (although not universally) accomplished essayists. The essays begin with selections from the work of Michel de Montaigne, who is considered to be the father of the essay and responsible for its development in early modern Western civilization, along with essays by William Cornwallis and Francis Bacon from the early seventeenth century. Moving on to eighteenth century essayists we have Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson represented for their writings. The nineteenth century has more essayists included, namely William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander Smith, Walter Pater, and Agnes Repplier. Consistent with the presentist bias of most literary collections, though, it is little surprise that the vast majority of essayists included are from the twentieth century: William Dean Howells, Josè Ortega y Gasset, A.C. Benson, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Musil, G.K. Chesteron, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Walter Murdoch, Enrique Anderson Imbert, Max Bense, Mariano Picón-Slas, Germán Arciniegas, Theodor Adorno, Aldous Huxley, Michael Hamburger, Fernand Ouellette, Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, Edward Hoagland, E.B. White, William H. Gass, Jean Starobinski, Andrè Belleau, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gabriel Zaid, Scott Russell Sanders, Phillip Lopate, Gerald Early, Susan Sontag, Nancy Mairs, Rachel Blau Duplessis, and Cynthia Ozick. The editors even try their hand at some of the essayists of the current century: Vivian Gornick, John D'Agata, Paul Graham, Ander Monson, John Bresland, and Jeff Porter. Alas, none of my essays were included.
Despite the attempts by the author to cast a wide variety of essayists in order to avoid a selection that was too narrowly focused on distinguished European and European-American male writers (which would not have bothered me, but would certainly have made this collection less diverse for those who care about such matters), there are a lot of similarities that run through these essays. Essayists often feel it necessary to defend themselves or defend their genre despite it being somewhat rough around the edges and filled with the inner workings of the author's thinking, and some focus on the need for authenticity and others fret about essayists being self-absorbed and there are continual worries that the essay is dead or dying and that it has been co-opted by the less free article and its commercial and political demands. Yet the essay continues to live on, and although there are discussions of video essays and radio essays as ways that the essay is moving into genres outside of merely textual ones, it is surprising how few people write about blogs and the relationship of blogging to the early periodicals of the eighteenth century as being similarly low barrier of entry areas for writers to explore their chosen topics without the commercial pressure that writers often face. Few ever sought to be rich writing the essay, but in being themselves, many essayists have found themselves quite like other essayists of a diverse tribe of people.
July 10, 2012
It's a long list of essaysts, what they wrote and particulary what they wrote about essays. It's better to use this book, in my opinion, as a consultation book instead that reading it all together because it could be boring.
Lunga lista di saggisti da Montaigne a Sedaris, quello che hanno scritto in generale e in particolare sui saggi. Meglio utilizzare questo libro come volume da consultazione piuttosto che leggerlo tutto di seguito, perchè sulla lunga distanza, secondo me, potrebbe risultare un po' noioso.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND UNIVERITY OF IOWA PRESS FOR THE PREVIEW
Lunga lista di saggisti da Montaigne a Sedaris, quello che hanno scritto in generale e in particolare sui saggi. Meglio utilizzare questo libro come volume da consultazione piuttosto che leggerlo tutto di seguito, perchè sulla lunga distanza, secondo me, potrebbe risultare un po' noioso.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND UNIVERITY OF IOWA PRESS FOR THE PREVIEW
March 1, 2014
Broad and comprehensive coverage of the essay's range in an infinitely readable anthology. With brief introductions to each essay, touchstone essayists' perspectives are gathered here in a kind of exemplified synopsis of the genre. A tremendous resource!
May 5, 2012
Enjoyed!Good collection!
February 28, 2012
An excellent resource on the essay as a genre.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews