SearchMy accountHelpBasket0 items

Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities

The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay

Edited by Mario Aquilina, Nicole B. Wallack and Bob Cowser Jnr.

Format

£175.00

In stock

About this book

Provides a comprehensive overview of the essay, with a focus on current debates about the form
  • Includes interviews with eight major contemporary essayists (Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, Brian Dillon, David Shields, Leslie Jamison, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Robert Atwan and Jamaica Kincaid)
  • Explores the theory, history, formal features and political contexts of the essay
  • Focuses on the contemporary essay while also surveying the key moments and essayists in the history of the essay
  • Extends the theory of the essay by addressing key aspects of the form, such as, the construction of an essayistic self, the relation between the self and the other in the essay, and the relation between the essay and the world ‘out there’
  • Explores the relationship between the essay and adjacent forms, such as, philosophical writing, the column, science writing, the novel, the lyric, the advertisement and more

The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay distinguishes itself by the wide range and scope of its themes, voices and approaches. Thirty-five leading essayists, literary critics and writing instructors explore the essay from multiple perspectives, including its theories, forms and histories as well as its cultural, political and pedagogical contexts. In particular, the volume extends the theory of the essay by addressing topics such as the construction of an essayistic self and the political dimensions of essaying. It further explores the relationship between the essay and other forms, such as philosophical writing, the column, science writing, the novel, the lyric and the advert as well as the essay in digital spaces.

Reviews

This admirable entry in the wide-ranging series “Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Arts” is a must-read for anyone interested in the art of the essay. [...] Summing Up: Essential.
Underlying the chapters—and adding significantly to their effectiveness—is a sense that the contributors enjoy the form they’re writing about. Their grasp of essayistic literature, particularly in its contemporary manifestations, is impressive. This means that their analyses are supported by a persuasive range of example and reference. The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay offers a wide-ranging, multifaceted, and engaging examination of this hard-to-pin-down genre. It will be an invaluable guide both for those approaching the essay for the first time and those already well versed in it who wish to further their understanding of its mercurial nature and seemingly endless possibilities.
While the essay as a form might embrace ambiguity and uncertainty, the expert essays compiled herein are clear and authoritative in their historical and formal sweep. This volume is serious-minded and impressive in its scope, but never boring. It’s high time for such a necessary examination of this vital and ever-evolving form.
To appreciate the full breadth and depth of the essay, you need a diverse array of guides and that is what you will find in this volume, where scholars, teachers and writers combine to reveal the pleasures and powers of this versatile literary form and its relevance to the issues of our day.
Table of contents

List of Figures

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

Mario Aquilina, Bob Cowser Jr and Nicole B. Wallack

Part I: Theories and Definitions

1. Affinities and Contestations: The Self and the Other in the Essay

Mario Aquilina

2. The Birth of the English Essay

Alan Stewart

3. The Problem of a Name: The Essay and Its Titles

Thomas Karshan

4. The Thing of the Essay

Erin Plunkett

5. Essay, Fiction, Truth, Troth

Jason Childs

6. The Essay as Resistance

Kara Wittman

7. ‘Lived’ Experience, ‘Sought’ Experience and the Personal Essay

Douglas Hesse

8. The Essay and the Advertisement

R. Eric Tippin

Contemporary Essayists in Focus

Rebecca Solnit

Claudia Rankine

Brian Dillon

Part II: Publics, Pedagogies and Histories

9. On Reading and the Essay

Nicole B. Wallack

10. Heretical Hearts and the Infinite Game: Why Teaching the Essay (Still) Matters

Bob Cowser Jr

11. The Essay and the Episteme: A Genealogy for Modern Classroom Use

Kevin Rulo

12. Commonplace Mysteries: Soaring on the Wings of Desire

Pat C. Hoy

13. Politics and the English Essay

Bruce Robbins

14. The Postwar American Essay, the Liberal Imagination and the Contemporary Essay

Phillip Lopate

15. Everybody’s Protest Essay: Personal Protest Prose on the American Internet

Briallen Hopper

16. Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Contemporary Women Essayists and Their Golden Moment

Jenny Spinner

17. The Essay in Asian (American) Contexts

Louise Kane

18. Beyond the Cocoon of Humanism: Essaying in the Ecological Turn Through Contradiction and Being Present

Sarah Allen

Contemporary Essayists in Focus

Leslie Jamison

Robert Atwan

Kaitlyn Greenidge

Part III: Form and Genre

19. On the Interface between Philosophy and the Essay: Foucault’s Essayistic Ethos

Kurt Borg

20. The Essay as Brinkmanship: Cioran’s Fragment, Aphorism and Autobiography

Arleen Ionescu

21. Science Essays

Dirk Vanderbeke

22. Columnism and Essayism

Ivan Callus

23. The Lyric Essay: Truth-Telling Through Reader Participation

Beth Peterson

24. The New Seesaws of the Digital Visual Essay: Genre Provocations, Definitions and Tensions Beyond the Age of Print

Elizabeth F. Chamberlain

25. Archival Materials: Essayism as a Process of Witness, Care and Reckoning

Julija Šukys

26. The Essay as Trans Body

Glenn Michael Gordon

27. Why the (Animal) Essay Matters

Paolo Bugliani

Contemporary Essayists in Focus

David Shields

Jamaica Kincaid

Notes on Contributors

Index

About the contributors

Mario Aquilina

Mario Aquilina is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Malta. He is the lead editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022), editor of The Essay at the Limits (2021), and author of The Event of Style in Literature (2014). He has edited two special issues of CounterText (‘Electronic Literature, Again’ [2.2] and ‘Time of the Essay’ [9.3]) published widely about the essay and literary theory in edited collections as well as journals like Oxford Literary Review, CounterText, Electronic Book Review, Life Writing, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and Cahiers Elisabethains. He is also the Lead Investigator of the Erasmus+ funded project, Essays Beyond Borders.

Nicole B. Wallack

Nicole B. Wallack is the Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program and Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. She is the author of Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies (Utah State UP, 2017). She is also a senior faculty associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College where she designs and leads professional development workshops and seminars for educators across disciplines and educational contexts. Wallack publishes and teaches in the fields of essay studies, writing studies, English education, and educational history.

Bob Cowser Jnr.

Bob Cowser Jr. is Professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, where he has taught courses in nonfiction writing, film and American literature since 1998. He is the author of three nonfiction books and editor of a fourth, most recently Green Fields, Crime Punishment and a Boyhood Between (UNO Press 2010), which won “Best Memoir 2010” from the Adirondack Center for Writers and was cited in Best American Essays. Cowser is also the editor of Why We’re Here: Essayists on Living Upstate (Colgate UP 2010) and serves as advisory editor to the online journal ASSAY: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.

More in this series

See the series →