Awards

• Winner of CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2021.

Overview

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? Sometimes 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. Perhaps 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 DL essays which, taken together, form the most substantial book yet published on the essay in Britain and America.

Full Product Details

Author:   Thomas Karshan (Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of East Anglia) ,  Kathryn Murphy (Fellow and Tutor in English Literature, Oriel College, and Associate Professor, English Faculty, University of Oxford)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.50cm , Height: 2.90cm , Length: 24.20cm
Weight:   0.760kg
ISBN:  

9780198707868

ISBN 10:   019870786
Pages:   400
Publication Date:   03 September 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy: Introduction: On the difficulty of introducing a work of this kind 1: Thomas Karshan: What is an Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf 2: Warren Boutcher: The Montaignian Essay and Authored Miscellanies from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century 3: Kathryn Murphy: Of Sticks and Stones: The Essay, Experience, and Experiment 4: Markman Ellis: Time and the Essay: The Spectator and Diurnal Fomr 5: Fred Parker: The Sociable Philosopher: David Hume and the Philosophical Essay 6: Scott Black: Tristram Shandy, Essayist 7: Denise Gigante: On Coffee Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition 8: Gregory Dart: The Romantic Essay and the City 9: Felicity James: Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity 10: Tom Wright: Carlyle, Emerson, and the Voiced Essay 11: Ophelia Field: Retiring or Engaging: Politics in the English Essay 12: Stefano Evangelista: Things Said By The Way: Walter Pater and the Essay 13: Bharat Tandon: 'Strips of Essayism': Eliot, Hardy, and the Victorian Periodical Essay 14: Michael Wood: Rational Distortions: Essays in the British Novel After Borges 15: Ned Stuckey-French: Creative Non-Fiction and the Lyric Essay: The American Essay in the Twenty-First Century 16: Adam Phillips: Up To A Point: The Psychoanalyst and the Essay 17: Christy Wampole: Dalí's Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice

Reviews

... there is also much to engage [essayists'] interest. Attempting to summarize the book's seventeen chapters is beyond the reach of a brief review... It's... welcome to see editors of anthologies being credited for doing important work in framing their topics . * Chris Arthur, St. Andrews, Scotland, World Literature Today *

"Original research, innovative analysis, and clear writing make this ode to the essay an exemplary piece of scholarship. Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * C. B. Kerr, CHOICE * ... there is also much to engage [essayists'] interest. Attempting to summarize the book's seventeen chapters is beyond the reach of a brief review... It's... welcome to see editors of anthologies being credited for doing ""important work in framing their topics"". * Chris Arthur, St. Andrews, Scotland, World Literature Today * There is a tact ingrained in the scholarship of On Essays, almost always suggestive but very rarely showing off or settling scores. I thoroughly enjoyed it and thoroughly recommend it. * David Woodhouse, Hazlitt Review *"

Original research, innovative analysis, and clear writing make this ode to the essay an exemplary piece of scholarship. Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * C. B. Kerr, CHOICE * ... there is also much to engage [essayists'] interest. Attempting to summarize the book's seventeen chapters is beyond the reach of a brief review... It's... welcome to see editors of anthologies being credited for doing important work in framing their topics . * Chris Arthur, St. Andrews, Scotland, World Literature Today *

Author Information

Thomas Karshan is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford University Press, 2011), the co-translator of Nabokov's The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Penguin, 2012), and the editor of Nabokov's Collected Poems (Penguin, 2013). From 2018 to 2020 he was President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. He has published articles on modern British, American, and Russian literature, and essays in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. Kathryn Murphy is Fellow in English Literature at Oriel College, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Her academic work focuses on Renaissance poetry and philosophy, and on the literary essay. She is also a critic and essayist, writing regularly about still life painting for Apollo Magazine, and reviewing Czech literature for the TLS. She is currently writing two books: The Tottering Universal: Metaphysical Prose in the Seventeenth Century; and Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy, a study of distraction, attention, and The Anatomy of Melancholy.

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