Scott Black is Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is author of Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2019) as well as essays on The Spectator, Hume’s essays, Henry Fielding’s novels, eighteenth-century romance, Eliza Haywood, and Heliodorus.

Warren Boutcher is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 2017), and of numerous chapters and articles on the history of Montaigne’s Essais and on topics in the European literary and intellectual history of the late Renaissance. He is currently in the early stages of editing Europe: A Literary History, 1545–1659 (Oxford University Press).

Gregory Dart is Professor of English at University College London. He has published two monographs, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Metropolitan Art and Literature 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and has edited the collection Restless Cities (with Matthew Beaumont; Verso, 2010), and two editions of Hazlitt’s writings. He is currently General Editor of a new six-volume edition of the Works of Charles and Mary Lamb for Oxford University Press, for which he is undertaking to edit three volumes himself, the Works of 1818, the Essays of Elia, and the Miscellaneous Prose.

Denise Gigante, Professor of English at Stanford University, is a specialist in Romantic-period literature. She is the editor of The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005), two anthologies devoted to the genre of the literary essay, and ‘The Essay: An Attempt, a Protean Form’, published in Republics of Letters (2014). She is currently editing The Cambridge History of the English Essay with Jason Childs for Cambridge University Press.

Felicity James is Associate Professor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature at the University of Leicester. She is currently editing the children’s writing of Charles and Mary Lamb for the new Oxford Collected Works, and her books include Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Palgrave, 2008), and the co-edited (with Ian Inkster) Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle, 1740–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and (with Julian North) Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian auto/biography (Routledge, 2017). She co-chairs the Charles Lamb Society, which has held a birthday celebration for Charles Lamb each year since the 1930s; previous guests include Edmund Blunden, and new members are always welcome.

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 2019 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 the author of several articles on early modern prose, poetry, and poetics, with a particular focus on style and philosophy. She is also a critic and essayist, writing about still-life painting for Apollo Magazine, and reviewing Central European literature for the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently writing two books: The Tottering Universal: Metaphysical Prose in the Seventeenth Century, and Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy.

Fred Parker is a Fellow of Clare College and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (Oxford University Press, 2003) and, most recently, On Declaring Love: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Jane Austen (Routledge, 2018). An article on Addison’s Spectator essays, ‘Addison’s Modesty: The Essayist as Spectator’, is forthcoming in Essays on Addison, edited by Paul Davis for Oxford University Press.

Adam Phillips, is an essayist, psychoanalyst, and a visiting professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London. He has edited the essayists Charles Lamb and Walter Pater, writes frequently for the London Review of Books, Raritan, Salmagundi, and other journals, and is the author of numerous volumes of essays, including Attention Seeking (2019), In Writing: New and Selected Essays (2017), Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), and Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2013), all published by Penguin. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

†Ned Stuckey-French taught at Florida State University and was book review editor of Fourth Genre. He is the author of The American Essay in the American Century (University of Missouri Press, 2011), co-editor (with Carl Klaus) of Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (University of Iowa Press, 2012), and co-author (with Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French) of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Longman, 8th edition). His articles and essays have appeared in journals and magazines such as In These Times, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Walking Magazine, culturefront, Pinch, Guernica, middlebrow, and American Literature, and were listed five times among the notable essays of the year in Best American Essays.

Michael Wood is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. A longstanding essayist for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, he is the author, most recently, of The Habits of Distraction (Sussex Academic Press, 2018), On Empson (Princeton University Press, 2017), and Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest, 2015). His earlier works include Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and The Road to Delphi (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2003).

Note: Contributors from this book to look further into.

Location 257

Montaigne’s man nonetheless begins, by taking hold of an elk’s horn: a strange and apparently random place to start, but one that makes it possible for him to go on. A boldness in beginning, despite difficulty in finding a true point of origin, is a frequent characteristic of the essay form. Montaigne’s ‘Of Books’ declares ‘I want a man to begin with the conclusion […] I do not want a man to use his strength making me attentive and to shout at me fifty times “Or oyez!” in the manner of our heralds’ (365). For Theodor Adorno, in the most compelling modern statement on the essay, the form ‘starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say.’

Note: on hooks

Location 321

And yet a collection of essays conventionally demands one: an address to the reader which performs some of the duties of Montaigne’s herald, drawing attention to the subject, defining it, justifying its interest, delimiting its scope, accounting for its origins, and explaining what holds the contributions together.

Note: good criteria for he objectives of an intro

Location 328

run against the spirit of the essay, which is miscellaneous and anti-systematic: ‘methodically unmethodical’, in Adorno’s phrase. Defining the essay is notoriously difficult: indeed it is often suggested that ‘the one commonly accepted fact about the essay is that indeterminacy is germane to its essence’.

Note: it can be systemtic without being methodical; and though it can be misc fragments and indeterminate, dont we have a greater or equal canon of structured and resolute essays? if equal part structure and chaos, then structure shouldnt be in the definition; what is the source of insistence, shared among UK/US camps, on disjointedness?

Location 331

the essay on essays—what we might call the ‘meta-essay’—has been a feature of the form from the start. Montaigne, who originates the term by choosing the title Essais for the first edition of his miscellaneous discourses, published in 1580, is self-reflexive and self-baffled by the novelty of this new kind of book.

Note: perspective pattern: histoical precedent of interweaving the creation of the work with the work itself

Location 334

The essay is at once resistant to exhaustive definition, and yet—or thus—continually posing and reposing what Denise Gigante has called ‘the all-important question: what is the essay?’5 The seventeen essays collected in this volume likewise participate in the persistent urge to write about essays, despite their characteristic resistance to characterization.

Note: resistant to simicity because essay is the genre most synonymous to human thought, and so a definition is not mapimg literature as much as it mapping the complexity of the psyche, making this an almost Jungian project

Location 340

Every Man His Own Looking-Glass;—

Note: fragment from a Leigh Hunt essay tiile; i like the egalitarianism implicit in this phrase

Location 348

The essayist, as the titles of other periodicals tell us, is guardian, spectator, and egotist; a free thinker, the master of his own wit, but also the mere purveyor of commonplaces stolen from others.

Note: This fits Aristole's triad of rhetoric: the egotist/spector are the appeal to personal authority, ethos; the thinker/guardian operate within the shared rules of our intellectual memesphere, logos; and the games of wit and cliche reconstructions are about theblove of language appealing to the sensibilites of readers, pathos.

Location 350

concerned with the quotidian, or the trivial, and the strange, interested at once in tradition and contemporary ephemera.

Note: range

Location 354

‘The Hippopotamus Entered at Stationers’ Hall’, meanwhile, archly indicates the problems of literary form.9 Since to enter something at Stationers’ Hall is to register a work for the purposes of copyright, to introduce the essay there as a hippopotamus is to suggest that it is a paradoxical and monstrous creature which will blunder into and make a mess of established categories of writing and their rule-bound legislation.

Note: A better metaphor would be a Platypus enters Statipner's Hall, a creature no one knows if duck or mammal

Location 356

Despite the infinite variety of the stuff of the world, Montaigne likewise suggests in ‘Of Experience’, ‘we fasten together our comparisons by some corner’, like the curious elk’s horn on which the epileptic lights (998). Taking permission from Montaigne’s adhoccery, and Hunt’s happily despairing hunt, we here take hold of the elusive essay by several corners,

Note: not all corners are equal

Location 364

From one perspective, it should be easier to define the essay, and supply a story of its origins, than for any other form. Unlike other major kinds of literature—the novel, the epic, the sonnet, tragedy, comedy—the moment of the essay’s inception, its Adam and Eve, is clear. When Montaigne published a thick volume of treatises on various topics in 1580, he titled it his Essais, and thereby inaugurated a tradition. Before him, the word ‘essay’ was not used in print for a kind of literary composition; after him, essays proliferated.

Note: proto-essays existed, but Montaigne establised it himself as a genre by providing 1) volume, 2) range, 3) meta-theory, 4) multiple personalities, 5) intertextuality; and so in one man his descendents could see the output of a whole society, a modelnfor how they could participate, extend, refute, or mimic (Pascal)

Location 370

Since Montaigne himself nowhere refers to one of his individual discourses as an essay, it is usual in scholarship to refer to the…

Note: because not conceived as a single work and a single thesis, as basically all works before him did; he was a self in passing, capturing his evolution, with no arc, no linear assembly. You could rearrange the ordser of any given book with little lost, which is not true for book chapters. Id argue for chaos and non-linearity as traits at the catalog level, not as an axiom for composition

Location 377

it has become a trope, even a cliché, of essays on the essay to reach for word-history as a route into a characterization of the form: as Claire de Obaldia has remarked, ‘etymological evidence [is] always triumphantly brandished at some point or other’.12 The French ‘essai’, derived ultimately from the Latin exāgium, a weighing, could mean ‘trial’, ‘test’, ‘attempt’, ‘sounding’, ‘sample’, ‘temptation’, ‘risk’,…

Note: etymology is only cliche if its use yields a basic conclusion. save etymology for shock, revelation, and torque. montaigne doesnt use the word essay, but its stippled with "assay" all throughout, a cousin of "essay" with shared grandfather, "exagium," which inverts the modest attempt and instead suggests the rigorus analysis ofn a chemist

Location 380

the title-page of the Essais was thus a kind of modesty topos: the discourses printed on these pages, Montaigne suggested, would not be technical or controversial arguments, and should not be taken too seriously as the final, resolved opinions of the author, but instead understood as tentative and experimental discussions, the voice of an amateur or apprentice thinking aloud and liable to correction. Montaigne plays on the full range of its possible meanings, to propose essayistic writing as a tentative, risky, and experimental way of…

Note: epistemic uncertainty; montaigne invented a new literary epistemic atop classical ideas of moral philosophy, with from what ive read so far, no ventures into metaphysics

Location 386

The earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary finds for the word ‘essay’ as a noun is in the title of Francis Bacon’s Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of perswasion and disswasion, published in 1597.15 This title carries none of the ambiguity of intention of Montaigne’s Essais: Bacon’s apposition makes clear that ‘essayes’ names the form of the first set of writings in the book. The same is true of Cornwallis’s Essayes of 1600, Robert Johnson’s Essaies, or rather Imperfect offers of 1601, and the title given to John Florio’s English translation of Montaigne in 1603: The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo:…

Note: makes sense that when the act of essaying is frozen onto a page and communicated as literature, it transforms inton a noun, as the reader sees a fixed product and nor a process. the writer knowng he will be read risks thinking as a noun, to meet the target, instead of living the verb at the source of thought

Location 393

It has proved easier to define the noun ‘essay’ than the form to which it gave a name. Anthologists and lexicographers are forced to cast a net as wide as possible, offering the barest minimum of characteristics. W. E. Williams’s formulation, in the introduction to his 1942 A Book of English Essays, was succinct: ‘the Essay is a piece of prose, usually on the short side, which is not devoted to narrative’.17 The OED is more expansive: ‘A composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject; originally implying want of finish, “an irregular undigested piece” (Johnson), but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.’18 For Williams, the necessary criteria are that it is shortish, in prose, and does not tell a story; for the OED’s lexicographer, even the latter two of these stipulations are abandoned: the essay is not too long and is about something.

Note: all these short definitioms miss the verb angle: a personal exploration around a question that unifies literary composition patterns across genres. speaks to both the mind at work and its potential for wide formal mutations. and why not a long 27-part definition too?

Location 404

If, as Montaigne suggests in ‘Of Experience’, there is ‘no quality […] so universal as diversity and variety’, then the pursuit of common features is futile.

Note: There are absolutely common features within and across Montaigne essays. The following excerpt (“I do not portray being, but passing”) doesn’t relate to an inability to characterize. Yes, he can be a self-evolving man of gas with no stable form, but that does not mean his writing has no stable form! The words don’t shift languages or turn into three-dimensional beasts that claw out the page. There are stable patterns, of course of language and grammar, but in composition too.

Location 414

Montaigne’s essay is the opposite of decisions or resolutions: various, changeable, contradictory, befuddled, staggering, drunk. This unruliness—irregularity, or ‘the Wildness of those Compositions which go by the Name of Essays’, as Addison put it in terms which became widespread in the eighteenth century—acts as a warning against attempts at generalization.19 Indeed, Adorno suggested that the knowledge offered by the essay is not that of definition, but experience,

Note: Again, certainty and definability are completely separate issues! Adorno names experience here. Might that not be one stable pattern of an essay? If a Wikipedia article has no experience from its author, it’s not an essay. Each experience is singular, but can we not create criteria for what makes something an experience? And what about a typology of experiences? Or a rubric on the effectiveness of a rendered experience, one we could use to measure any instance? Miscellaneity is not void of common properties.

Location 421

The actual title which Hunt chose for his periodical—The Indicator—suggests a similar attitude: rather than a formula, essays offer a demonstration, pointing at particular things for the reader to recognize. Abstraction is the enemy: William Hazlitt begins ‘On Reason and Imagination’ by declaring: ‘I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions…’21

Note: Agree that the act of writing and essay is non formulaic, and should be void of empty abstractions and generalities; that doesn’t mean there isn’t a non-linear abstract architecture to help understand the mosaic of specific revelations being ‘shown.’

Location 427

Essays appear at the length of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)—belying Williams’s insistence on the shortness of essays—or the brevity and lightness of Montaigne’s one-page ‘Of Thumbs’, or the disposable single sheets of the Spectator’s daily publications. They can be fervently and committedly political, like the works collected in James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955), or confined to leisure and detachment, as in Montaigne’s own works, a paradox explored by Ophelia Field’s contribution in this volume. They can be personally confessional, or pseudonymously estranged, via personae like the Tatler’s Isaac Bickerstaff or Charles Lamb’s Elia; encompass the witness accounts of journalism, as in Hazlitt or George Orwell, or fantasies and dreams, such as Lamb’s ‘Dream-Children’. Even the suggestion that an essay is a piece of prose finds a challenge in works like James VI and…

Note: Length is not a property, and all the dualities here represent different combinations of patterns. Ie: a political essay is a particular way to use argument, references, response, and catalyst, yet Montaigne can use those same patterns towards a non-political end; arguing about morals, citing Plutarch, and offering a call to action only as an irony. This is again mistaking instances for the more general patterns beneath them. An essay can be political, and a group of political essays may comprise a subgenre, but political vs. non-political essays is a matter of content, and all content works over the same patterns. Similarly, whether an essay has real stakes of confession, or shielded behind a pseudonym, but draw from a shared Experience pattern. Feels like there’s a continuous confusion between content and form.

Location 433

From the mid-seventeenth century into the eighteenth, the word ‘essay’ was at once ubiquitous—over 1,500 works were published between 1642 and 1714 with the word in the title—and often interchangeable with ‘Discourse’ or ‘Dissertation’, though ‘essay’ often implies a more tentative approach. Locke, in his dedication and epistle to his Essay, shifted back and forth between ‘essay’ and ‘treatise’. Addison and Steele, in the Tatler and Spectator, preferred ‘papers’, resisting, like Samuel Johnson after them, too close an association with wayward Montaigne: we go sixty-eight issues of the Spectator before we find the first use of the word ‘essay’, and 101 issues before we come to the first time that the term is applied to the ‘little Diurnal Essays’ of the periodical itself.22 Others prefer the modesty…

Note: The word originally was a proxy for confidence, in fact all words have some potential indicator of confidence; where manifesto and treatise and dissertation are all high-confidence, where essay, proxy, sketch, and notes are low. Today though, essay has upshifted to mean “formal” in a world of notes, tweets, logs, and such.

Location 443

the essay has also always lent itself to hybrid forms, from the essayistic novels and novelistic essays of Henry Fielding, George Eliot, Robert Musil, and Milan Kundera (denying the separation of narrative and essay on which definitions insist), the hybrid prose and poetry of Abraham Cowley and Claudia Rankine, to photo-essays, film-essays, and video-essays which are at once unimaginable from the perspective of Montaigne’s late sixteenth-century beginnings,

Note: A hybrid across genres, yet also within the genre. Essay itself absorbs moves from every other genre, all applied to the medium of thought.

Location 454

a common tradition of experiment, tentative thought, experiential reasoning, and avoidance of definition, resolution, and closure.25

Note: I like the pillars of experiment, ambiguity, and “experiential reasoning.” An essay should not open with definitions, but often do enjoy when essays coin terms. Agree that it does not need closure, but closure is not necessarily disqualifying.

Location 457

As Hugh Walker wrote in his 1915 The English Essay and Essayists—still the most substantial single-author study of the history of the form in English—‘just as, in the days before enclosures, stray cattle found their way to the unfenced common, so the strays of…

Note: Great simile; deconstruct how this is so much better than the generic AI metaphors

Location 460

Warren Boutcher, in his contribution to this volume, argues against taking the essay as a genre at all, placing it instead in a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing. The essay has been called ‘less a genre than quite deliberately an antigenre, designed to flaunt the prescriptiveness in literary matters which had been inherited from a rationalistic rhetorical tradition’; one critic calls it a ‘Proteus’, saying that ‘there is no genre that takes so many shapes and that refuses so systematically to resolve itself, finally, into its own shape’; another, that it is ‘a genre legitimated by its existence outside any genre’, which ‘retains its character only when it constantly intersects with other genres’; a fourth suggests that it is ‘a moment of writing before the genre,…

Note: This leads into essay as mode, and ignores genre altogether. Yes the massive matrix of possibilities and shapes does make it much harder to identify its recurring patterns, and it’s made harder because since not every writers knows or cares about the underlying patterns, its effort to dissect which rules any given writer is playing by,

Location 463

For Rachel Blau du Plessis, ‘given that the essay is all margin, marginalia, and interstitial writing, it rearranges, compounds, enfolds, and erodes the notion of center in textually fruitful ways.’28 ‘Essay’ becomes one of those words, like ‘nonsense’, ‘miscellaneous’, or ‘etc.’, which Susan Stewart describes as making ‘a category that is both negative…

Note: Gaps and centerlessness are celebration of disorder; fragmentation is typically most enjoyed when you buy into the ideology of fragmentation; and yes, our society is of course radically fragmenting, but that’s not a license to mirror that in our work. Similarly, as cities have alienated its inhabitants, the sin of modern architecture, according to Alexander against Eisenman, is to make grotesque buildings that aim to strike cerebral resonance in the small art-appreciating demographic. As a counterpoint, I love Pessoa, but he is a fragmented identity with pieces that are whole and well-scoped. Jung acknowledges fragments, but makes the case towards unification. I am all for wild juxtaposition in a single essay, but so long as it comes with a skewer of cohesion. The best essayist will use their reaches of association to summon off material arrangements, but their precision of logic to rotate and trim each brick in a particular way, to create, instead of soup, a journey of both logic and dream logic.

Location 471

This unlegislated gathering of strays and fugitives, giving a name of form to formlessness, has irked some writers. Samuel Johnson blamed Montaigne for having ‘reconciled mankind’ to ‘licentiousness’ ‘by the vivacity of his essays’: ‘he therefore who wants skill to form a plan or diligence to pursue it, needs only entitle his performance an essay, to acquire the right of heaping together the collections of half his life, without order, coherence, or propriety.’30 In this book we have tried to strike a balance between the licence offered by the title of ‘essay’, and the worry expressed by Johnson that the word might act as an excuse for not engaging in the proper work of definition. Our book is entitled On Essays, not On…

Note: I’m glad that they called out this tension. Even Johnson though, is really only speaking “against disorder” and not “towards order.” To me that is the challenge: how do you bring an organic order to an organic beast? What is order without procedure, formula, and mechanism? What would be a natural order to the essay that honors radical mutation and forms of expression?

Location 476

‘What a prodigy it is’, Montaigne exclaims, that the drop of seed from which we [humans] are produced bears in itself the impressions not only of the bodily form but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers! Where does that drop of fluid lodge this infinite number of forms? And how do they convey these resemblances with so heedless and irregular a course that the great-grandson will correspond to his great-grandfather, the nephew to the uncle? (701) It is not difficult to transpose from human genus to literary genre: what Montaigne says here is true of the history of the essay, in which family resemblances skip generations, realize potential in unexpected ways, mutate, recur, lie dormant for decades, then spring to life again. Virginia Woolf, a great historian as well as practitioner of the essay, likewise turned to the metaphor of family resemblance in her ‘The Modern Essay’ of 1922. ‘The form’, she concedes, ‘admits variety. The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about God or Spinoza, or about turtles and…

Note: I like this point, that the study of realized essays and lineage of influence is not necessarily a full representation of the extents of the form. Similarly, as profound as Montaigne is, he is certainly and self-admiringly lacking compositional skill in certain areas, and so it would be wrong to over-emulate or define the media solely from him since he is the originator.

Location 485

this volume, after two more general essays by Karshan and Boutcher, is organized chronologically, from Montaigne to the present. Most contributions focus on one of the typical characteristics of this family, as it finds expression in particular members, but with an eye to the whole tradition, its edges and its blurring with others. Each contribution, like Adorno’s traveller in a foreign country, points out the essay or the essayistic in different contexts; each essay,…

Note: Solid structure! To understand the generalities through specific archetypes. Am structuring my summer syllabus in a similar way. Concepts need personification.

Location 499

Francis Bacon, author of the first published book of English essays, also put novelty and tradition in uneasy relation in the dedication of a manuscript version of his essays, claiming that ‘the word is late, but the thing is ancient’; in other words, that while calling a composition an ‘essay’ was new, the form of writing it designated was not.33 Like Montaigne’s idea of the human person, the essay is at once idiosyncratically novel, and a reworking of inherited features.

Note: True, but Bacon also did not beholden lot of Montaignisms. Without Montaigne, what would Bacons collection be called? If it were called essays, would he be the origin? Montaigne is incomplete as a totalizing father, but from what I know of Bacon, Montaigne is more than the word, he uniquely possess a constellation of founding traits

Location 509

Bacon pointed to Seneca’s letters to Lucilius, which, he claimed, were ‘but Essays,—That is dispersed Meditations, though conveyed in the form of Epistles’.34 Montaigne wrote an essay ‘In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch’, and Joseph Addison similarly nominated Seneca, alongside Montaigne, as his essayistic ‘Patterns’.35 In doing so, they separated themselves from a strain of ornate and orderly oration associated with Cicero, and laid claim to a tradition of miscellaneous, curious, moral writing. Seneca’s Epistulae morales, or ‘moral letters’, were a sequence of 124 short Latin texts dating to the first century ad each written on a theme—‘On the Terrors of Death’, ‘On Philosophy and Friendship’, ‘On the Reasons for Withdrawing from the World’, ‘On Meeting Death Cheerfully’, ‘On Grief for Lost Friends’, ‘On Drunkenness’, ‘On Gathering Ideas’, ‘On Discursiveness in Reading’, ‘On the Fickleness of Fortune’, ‘On Style as a Mirror of Character’. They tend to begin with an anecdote, a memory, a concrete observation, before broadening to generalized and moral statements in a Stoic vein. Plutarch’s Moralia, written in Greek slightly later in the same century, is a collection of seventy-nine texts on similarly miscellaneous topics, taking in a wider range of subjects than Seneca’s Epistulae: alongside moral questions of virtue, education, and prudence appear antiquarian discussions, anthropology, natural speculations, and collections of anecdotes and sayings, including ‘On Profiting from One’s Enemies’, ‘On Superstition’, ‘On Isis and Osiris’, ‘On The E at Delphi’, ‘On Curiosity’, ‘Whether Land or Sea Animals are Cleverer’, and ‘On the Eating of Flesh’. The inclusion of the word ‘moral’ in the titles of so many seventeenth-century volumes of essays demonstrates how closely the form was understood as pursuing the same path as the wisdom literature of Seneca and Plutarch, with its witty alternation of general precept and personal speculation: ‘their teaching’, Montaigne says, ‘is the cream of philosophy, and presented in simple and pertinent fashion’ (364).36 Their mosaic of different topics was also enabling: ‘the knowledge I seek is there treated in detached pieces that do not demand the obligation of long labor, of which I am incapable. […] I need no great enterprise to get at them, and I leave them whenever I like. For they have no continuity from one to the other’ (364).37 The detachment of their separate considerations, their shortness, and their freedom of form to begin and leave off at will, remarked by everyone from Montaigne to Adorno as key features of the essay, are what appeal. The examples of Seneca and Plutarch served more generally to develop a new style of vernacularized philosophy in the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries which privileged matter and particularity over formal or oratorical eloquence, and cultivated a high regard for erudition conducted with a gentlemanly informality, also characteristic of Charles Lamb or Leigh…

Note: Traditional of a mosaic of informal explorations of a moral through a microcosm; not formal, rigorous, abstract—writer/readerly — where does meditations fit into this? Marcus aerlius kept a private journal, and so there was no persona or imagined reader, but he meets the criteria above.

Location 514

The recognized model of Seneca and Plutarch amplifies the point made by Warren Boutcher in his contribution to this volume, that essays participate in a much longer tradition of various and miscellaneous writing that…

Note: Essay as a democratic (/demotic, /folk) object

Location 541

Recent anthologists have taken this beyond the scope of the direct genealogies of the European and American essay. Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay includes, in its ‘Forerunners’ section, passages from Sei Shōnagon’s tenth-century Pillow Book, from the fourteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk Kenko, and from the eleventh-century Chinese writer Ou-Yang Hsiu.38 John d’Agata’s Lost Origins of the Essay begins at the moment when the use of writing by the Sumerian civilization is first recorded for a purpose other than accounting and administration, in ‘The List of Ziusudra’—anticipating the essay’s tendency to the mosaic and listing form—and includes…

Note: Both these imply globalism, which sure is great, but Lopate conflates a single pattern as the only pattern (personal experience), and D’Agatha brings the ideology of the fractured.

Location 543

Writing in a five-volume translation of Plutarch’s Morals published in 1684, the translator Matthew Morgan suggested that Plutarch’s ‘way was that of Common-Place Book’.40 The practice of commonplacing assembled quotations, exempla, and aphorisms under thematic headings, and acted as the storehouse of latent ideas from which a schoolboy or writer could draw material to be assembled into more sustained argument, oratory, or literary composition. It digested reading into fodder for writing, and made writing a process of assembly of pre-existing material, rather than the creation of new matter. Montaigne himself acknowledges the potential to view his essays as a kind of anthology of the words of others, a florilegium: ‘someone might say of me that I have here only made a bunch of other people’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them’ (984). Bacon’s earliest essays barely supplied that thread: his editor Michael Kiernan comments that ‘[s]ome would view the ten earliest essays […] as little more than pages from Bacon’s commonplace books’, raw matter in which sentences were divided by…

Note: Feels akin to internet assemblage, and another point towards the essay being a folk medium most fit for the 21st century. Direct point for the reader-to-writer pipeline that no other genre holds.

Location 553

Still, the bricolage features of the essay, a fragmentary aesthetics of compilation, persist. Brian Dillon has recently remarked on the essayist’s predilection for lists, for the accumulation of disparate material that contains, latently, patterns of relation and extrapolation left to the reader to develop.44 Morgan’s comments on Plutarch register a similar relish, drawing on an image in Erasmus: Plutarch’s writing is ‘like a piece of Mosaic work, which consists of several Parts, but all extremely Beautiful’.45 The idea of an essay as a mosaic, an intricate tessellation of material in which the originality and beautiful consists both in the appeal of the individual segments, and the intricacy of their patterning, is still visible in modern compilatory essays, such as Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing, a ‘serial essay’ which concatenates disparate information drawn from the legends and anthropology of many cultures to create an echo-chamber of human variety, or in the generically unassimilable meanders of the books of W. G. Sebald.46

Note: I like fragmentation—my logs, the Arcades project, etc.—and there is a detector-like joy in readerly assembly, but an essay is not a silo of raw materials, it is a linear act of will, a frozen or simulated thought process driven by a question. There is beginning and end! If the parts can be randomly rearranged with no consequence on meaning, then it’s not an essay. I’m weary of the bricolage metaphor being used to justify amateur quiltery; the challenge of stitching is in arrangement and seams! The A>B seam is different than the A>C seam.

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The model suggests that we might read the fragmentary aphorisms of Bacon’s early essays rather as a site of potential, than of haphazard unfinishedness.

Note: Total cope. You can say this about any assemblage of things. This is the sin of modern art. A toilet bowl in the MoMA inspires a potential of interpretations.

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how many stories have I spread around which say nothing of themselves, but from which anyone who troubles to pluck them with a little ingenuity will produce numberless essays. […] They often bear, outside of my subject, the seeds of a richer and bolder material, and sound obliquely a subtler note, both for myself, who do not wish to express anything more, and for those who get my drift. (224) Montaigne describes the purpose of his ‘stories’—the classical exempla, the personal and historical anecdotes scattered throughout his work—as a storehouse. Each example contains the possibility for ‘numberless essays’ to which it might give rise (224). The essay we are reading is a proxy which stands in for innumerable essays that others may have written, that the reader may yet write. They are the ‘seeds’ from which other essays might grow.

Note: Yes, all material transfigures based on frame and context, but this doesn’t mean we need to strip all frame and create a mosaic of equal context so the reader can pluck and use themselves. A reader can just as easily pluck an anecdote from a linear context and give it a totally different life. A lot of the logic here is conspiracy theory logic: combining excerpts and post-modern theories to support an unfounded claim. In a quite meta way, it’s like I’m watching the ineffectiveness of the mosaic theory at work. Things are plucked for association, and the resulting conclusion is an imagined synergy inspired by the unconscious desire of their thesis, rather than the true and linear relationship between the material if it were understood in full.

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The association of the essay with commonplacing links it to the schoolroom, and to an inculcation of habits of thought and cultural norms: qualities which seemingly run counter to the wildness and licentiousness also attributed to the essay. This paradox leads to a dilemma at the heart of the history of the essay, and scholarship and criticism on it, which casts a considerable irony over a volume of essays on essays written largely by people employed by universities. One of the oddities of the essay is that it begins as a literary genre of tentativeness and resistance to institutionalized knowledge, but is now most commonly written as the standard mode of instruction and assessment and usual genre of school and undergraduate writing, especially in the humanities. Montaigne’s long essay ‘Of Pedantry’ indicts the desiccated paralysis of ‘scholars’ and contrasts them with his own writing: they ‘distinguish and mark off their ideas more specifically and in detail. I, who cannot see beyond what I have learned from experience, without any system, present my ideas in a general way, and tentatively. As in this: I speak my meaning in disjointed parts’ (1004). The essay resists scholarship and orderly composition: ‘I put forward formless and unresolved notions’ (278). He claims to emulate the actual course of thinking, moving wildly from one subject to another in order ‘to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind’ (331). His stipulations run directly against what are nowadays the criteria used to assess essays in pedagogical contexts: definition of terms and method, orderly structure and clear argument, lack of digression, impersonality of tone, avoidance of conjecture, provision of evidence, summative conclusions, completeness and coherence.

Note: There is middle-ground between incoherent drivel and mechanical form. If Montaigne were more scholarly, maybe he would have invented a curriculum to teach his process and prevent the medium from ossifying into stale formula. If the critics here were actually practicing essay writers, maybe they would realize not to take Montaigne humility and self-effacing tone for a definition of the form. Across Montaigne there is plenty of terms, arguments, focus, formality, abstraction, evidence, and conclusion! It is never presented in a predictable form, but rather hey are granular patterns that weave in and out, along with their opposites.

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Brian Blanchfield justified calling his essays ‘proxies’ because the word ‘expresses a kind of concession to imprecision, a failure’, expressing the essay’s willingness to pledge itself less to truth and accuracy than to ad hoc and temporary expression, as in Montaigne’s insistence that he makes ‘essays’, not ‘decisions’.

Note: You can be uncertain in conclusion while still having a systematic form.

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Montaigne himself placed the word ‘essai’ in pedagogical contexts, yet did so precisely to stress the provisionality of his writing: I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance and permitting neither doubt nor dispute; matter of opinion, not matter of faith; what I reason out according to me, not what I believe according to God; as children set forth their essays [comme les enfans proposent leurs essais] to be instructed, not to instruct[.] (284)50

Note: Again, this is mislabeling Montaigne’s epistemic humility with an anarchy of form. Of course he has an organic looseness (which is desirable!) but there are definitely recognizable moves across his work. It is not Joycean. With the right translation it is readable.

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The ‘school-theme’ Florio refers to was a proposed subject on which a student had to write a composition, following standard rules of definition and example. Montaigne recalled, in ‘Of the Education of Children’, tutors ‘giv[ing him] a theme in the school fashion’: receiving a text on a given subject to recast in elegant Latin (156). By the middle of the seventeenth century, the essay had also become a pedagogical genre, an ‘exercise in the grammar school’, as the title of Ralph Johnson’s The Scholars Guide had it: An Essay is a short discourse about any virtue, vice, or other common-place. Such be Learning, Ignorance, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, Drunkenness, Usury, Love, Joy, Fear, Hope, Sorrow, Anger, Covetousness, Contentation, Labour, Idleness, Riches, Poverty, Pride, Humility, Virginity, &c.52 Johnson supplies rules for ‘making’ an essay, which, far from the changeable and drunken form inaugurated by Montaigne, work like a recipe for the exhaustive treatment of a topos, beginning by ‘express[ing] the nature of it in two or three short Definitions, or Descriptions’, establishing its sorts or kinds, its ‘causes, adjuncts, and effects’, while emphasizing that this should be done ‘briefly, without tautology or superfluous good words, in good and choice language’. It is not clear how long the essay’s previous history in the schoolroom was, especially since Johnson sends his reader to modern exemplars, referring to the ‘larger and complete Essays’ of Bacon and Owen Felltham.53 What is clear is that already by 1665, the fissure in senses of ‘essay’ had set in.

Note: Good distinction: the real problems of school essays are coercion, procedure, and templates. The core, maybe opening, clarification, is that you can have a system that is non-coercive, non-procedural, and non-templated—an organic system; ie: a system to teach the Montaginean way. You don’t just derive that from drunkenness and lawlessness. Look more into this 1655 book by Ralph Johnson.

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According to Ian Michael, the essay ultimately gained supremacy in large part due to its use in the rubrics of competitive public examinations, which were adopted widely from the 1850s, in an attempt to provide a meritocratic way of judging candidates for employment in the expanding professions and civil service, especially the Indian civil service.54 The emphasis on virtue and vice lingered on in the essay tradition, with candidates for exam papers being asked, for example, to ‘assess the characters’ of figures from Shakespeare. The purpose of such examinations was to offer candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their own character and merit, independent of any particular area of specialized knowledge or practical aim. The notion that the essay exposed the writer’s idiosyncrasy was harnessed to the meritocratic pretensions of a new educational and professional structure, which rewarded students for meeting certain well-recognized if often implicit structural and conceptual models. Peter Womack expresses these mixed messages—write freely, but conform to expectation; be yourself, but adopt the disinterested persona of the essayist—as the product of the ideological fantasy ‘that expressing one’s individuality and affirming one’s membership of the elite [should] become effectively identical’.

Note: There can be no idiosyncracy if topic mandated

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The essay’s role in the school and university systems thus became, in parallel, at once the codified mode of addressing a topic (along with strictures on structure, with models of four-point and five-point essays recommended by handbooks), and a prompt to a kind of playful composition which, despite or because of its pretence to lightness and spontaneity, did the work of forming an intellectual and social elite.56 Cyril Connolly wrote in Enemies of Promise that as late as 1938, ‘countless small boys’, suffering under the bad influence of Addison, ‘are at this moment busy setting down their views on Travel, the Great Man, Courage, Gardening, Capital Punishment to wind up with a quotation from Bacon’.57 John Gross, too, remembers with horror being asked in the classroom of the mid 1940s ‘to write a light-hearted essay all about nothing’ in the tradition of Lamb.58 One significant institutional survival of the personal essay about character is the American college admission essay, in which applicants are encouraged to draw a moral out of a personal anecdote, often about struggle, and enriched by…

Note: In these examples, an organic form is instrumentalized: you imitate a free-flowing mind to join a rank, pass a class, or get into college. Can you teach an essay in a school without instrumentalization. My 12th grade English teacher made us keep a journal, but did not read, only graded to the extent we filled it, which I suppose is pretty autonomous.

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Given the various ways in which the essay bristles against academic writing—its resistance to introductions, to definitions, to generalization and abstraction, to accounts of origins, its freedom from discipline, rules, and criteria—it is no wonder that the field of critical work on the essay is sparse. The essay has been relatively neglected in scholarly and critical accounts, since the characteristics associated with the essayistic—lack of authority, digression, marginality, and so on—are precisely those from which the professional study of literature had to distinguish itself, in order to make a claim to the systematic and methodical qualities that would win it respectability as a university discipline.60 Remarkably, there is only one substantial history of the essay in English, Hugh Walker’s The English Essay and Essayists (1915),61 though there are also several excellent studies of the essay in particular periods,62 while editors of anthologies have done important work in framing their topics.63 Though English is the language in which the form of the essay has been most…

Note: Almost confirms the point of essay scholarship is claim a literary niche by showing a neglected medium is legitimate. These works of criticism write upwards as for an appeal to entry, not down to the masses via education, who are disregarded as too systematic. Most literary criticism is elitist, but the essay is unique in that it’s simultaneously elitist and egalitarian. There is a canon, yet anyone can participate, even if they have no regard or awareness of that canon. Many bloggers write essays under a different name.

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Such meta-essays often avoid systematic definitions, preferring to offer their insights indirectly, by performing the features they claim as typical, as in Brian Dillon’s recent Essayism.

Note: Reminds me of Bloom’s anxiety of influence: join the canon by synthesizing it in a single work.

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The introductions by practising essayists contributed annually since 1986 to Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays anthologies form, taken together, one of the most substantial recent bodies of thought on the essay.

Note: I plan to study these systematically, and wonder if it’s been done before.

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Recently, Adam Gopnik has offered an unofficial history of the essay tradition through pieces in the New Yorker on Montaigne, Johnson, De Quincey, Wilde, Chesterton, and Beerbohm, while Woolf’s essays on essayists, including Montaigne, Addison, Hazlitt, and Lamb, constitute a thorough and insightful, if unofficial, history of the essay.

Note: Gather these, along with Tolentino and… that spiky guy on Substack whose name escape me.

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the second half, it was a neglected genre: its association with dilettantism and ephemerality, and its resistance to theory and abstraction, making it a less serious or worthy object of research and scholarly attention than the more obviously amenable genres of lyric, novel, or drama. However the twenty-first century has seen a revival of interest in the essay form, and forms of non-fiction prose more generally, at the same time as practice and publication of essays and memoirs has also significantly increased. Non-fiction prose, or creative non-fiction, is now a staple of creative writing and MFA programmes; bookshops host whole sections under titles like ‘Literary Essays’; and the publication both of new volumes of essays, and of studies of the essay, participates in the renewed attention to the form. Courses on the essay are increasingly available to undergraduates and graduates; and, in addition to this volume, several new studies have recently been published, or are emerging.67

Note: The deep history, the dark age, the revival. Similar arc to the psychedelic medicine movement. I wonder if this is a true countercultural pattern, or a rhetorical flourish. Also I notice how this ignores the Internet as a force in the revival.

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This is not a Handbook of the essay, an apparently comprehensive and general introductory guide to the workings of a form as to the operation of a machine or contraption; nor is it a Companion, suggesting that the essay is a single and singular personage, to an encounter with whom this book might act as chaperone; nor an Encyclopaedia, implying that we have delimited and anatomized our subject into its component parts; nor a History, suggesting that the essay has a continuous and causally connected past which could be summarized. Instead, we have called the volume On Essays, availing ourselves of the essay’s own titular habit, which implies at once its tendency to be about something, to have in view something which is its subject; while at the same time incorporating an awareness of the writer’s intentionality, the taking up of an angle, rather than a claim to definitiveness or completion. We have tried to do justice to the paradoxical, miscellaneous, and amorphous qualities of the form, and the possibilities and potentials they permit, without losing sight of family resemblances, and the various characteristic qualities which, despite their hopscotching across generations, are nonetheless recognizably traits of the essay.

Note: Does seem to be a work about mapping identifiable traits

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It is precisely this indirect mode of approaching the history of the essay which Thomas Karshan discovers in Chapter 1 of this book, ‘What is an Essay?’, which shows how Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street-Haunting’ acts as a consummation and recapitulation of the paradoxical, miscellaneous history of the essay as she saw it, looking back to Montaigne and Bacon, and incorporating the eighteenth-century periodical essayists, Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Hunt, Thoreau, Emerson, Stevenson, Butler, and Belloc. Woolf’s weaving of these references covertly into the incidents and accidents of a dusky walk through London in search of a pencil performs the contingent, chancy inheritance of traits across the essay form. Her essay is thus exemplary of something which emerges over and again in the writers discussed in the chapters of On Essays: the way in which the history of the essay is always being obliquely reimagined and rewritten when essayists rework tropes from their predecessors. This process continues today: so, for instance, ‘Street-Haunting’ has been a constant reference and inspiration for Rebecca Solnit, who calls Woolf a ‘Virgil guiding me through the uses of wandering, getting lost, anonymity, immersion, uncertainty, and the unknown’, and traces her ancestry as an essayist of self-loss back through Woolf to Thoreau.68

Note: Historical nods

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more essays were published in English than in any other European language (including French), in part because of the congruence of the essay’s informal, anti-systematic, and anti-metaphysical biases with the emergence of English experimentalism and empiricism (a justification for the incongruous title of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding). Kathryn Murphy’s contribution to this volume investigates this early English history, and the synonymity of essay, experience, and experiment in the seventeenth century.

Note: Now I wonder if anti-systematic refers to form or something else.

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Montaigne’s preoccupation with his own idiosyncratic experience turns, in Bacon, to an interest in experience as a cognitive virtue, divested of personality; and thence, across the English seventeenth century, to an association of the essay with the beginnings of experimental science, in Robert Boyle. This trajectory gives some grounding for the essay’s paradoxical relationship to science in later periods. On the one hand, for the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, the essay is ‘science, minus the explicit proof’, or for Max Bense, a German philosopher of science, ‘the essay is an experimental method […] in the same sense that one speaks of experimental physics’.69 On the other, for Pater, Woolf, Lukács, and Adorno, the essay is precisely the form that resists science and system. Murphy’s chapter shows the common origin of each of these positions in a preoccupation with experience rather than reason or authority as the ground of knowledge.

Note: Essay as applied empiricism for the masses

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The periodical essay also marks the shift of the essay’s primary locale from the closed gentlemanly spaces of the private study, garden, or experimental closet, as in Montaigne, Bacon, and their seventeenth-century followers, into the coffee-house and city.71 As Ellis shows, the material history of the periodical essay—both the signs of usage and reading on the single-sheet ‘Daily-Papers’, and the more substantial gathering of them into bound and collected volumes—demonstrates that the proper place of the Tatler and Spectator was at once the coffee-shop and the library, and shows their participation simultaneously in the ephemerality of the daily life of commercial London in the early 1700s, and in learned culture and the formation of taste.

Note: Change in scale

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The essay thus enriches the conversation of ordinary society with the ideas and discoveries of learning. But it also provides a conduit through which the learned world is supplied with an embodied, situated content of character, situation, and personae. The eighteenth-century vogue for the philosophical dialogue, or the essay in dialogue, something practised by Hume and advocated by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, shows the period’s sense that ideas require a person to whom they are attributed, in order to be evaluated or given credit.

Note: Importance of tangibility and specific examples. Good source for microcosm.

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This connection between the eighteenth-century essay and persona, dialogue, and associative digression allies it with the emergence in the same period of the novel. Eighteenth-century novels, like essays, are miscellaneous, and incorporate various discourses into a single intelligible whole, making connections between specialised thought and the ordinary, social world. Henry Fielding opens each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones with an essay; Parker shows that, no less than Hume or Samuel Johnson, Fielding’s fiction dramatizes the tension between intellect and society, opinions and life.

Note: Expand on how essays align with the golden age of the novel

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Gigante shows how the eighteenth-century combination of public consumption (of coffee and news) with the sociable discussion of ideas and formation of taste in the coffee-shop shifts to a world of isolated reverie and dream in the smoking houses of early nineteenth-century London. Hunt, nostalgic for the world of Addison and Steele, shapes the essay in resistance to the pressing activity of modern clock-watching, desiring a ‘humane openness of intercourse’ in which thought and life flow together in easy conversation.75 In keeping with the Romantic return to Montaigne as the presiding spirit of the essay, Hunt follows the smoker into Gliddon’s cigar divan, where he finds the Montaignian ‘arrière-boutique’ or back-room of the mind literalized in an exotic, orientalized space which seems to belong to a world entirely differing from the sociable, commercial one going on around it. What he sees there is something closer to the cloistered den of De Quincey’s Opium-Eater. A volume of Kant’s metaphysics replaces Addison’s communally-read Spectator, and wild hallucinations replace the sociable associations of thought.

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Lamb, as in Montaigne and Seneca, the essay is closely akin to the letter, and the related informality of style suits an era which articulated the ideal, in Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads, that poetry should be written in ‘the real language of men’.

Note: Original of write like you talk

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on both sides of the Atlantic, the essay continued the effort to voice itself directly and to build a public sphere, not through a virtual coffee-house, or a retreat into a confidential privacy, but by drawing together audiences in lecture halls. Formerly spectator, conversationalist, and correspondent, the essayist now becomes political orator or religious preacher. Yet, as Wright shows, in Carlyle and Emerson the essayist is a listener as well as a speaker, inviting into his essays the imagined voices of their publics, offering ‘a space of synthesis amidst the cacophony of society, in which multiple voices speak variously and sometimes in conflict but within a common space’. Emerson likened his essays to a ‘panharmonicon’, a huge mechanical organ invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the capacity to imitate the sounds of other instruments and thus a whole orchestra. The essayist comes to play a role in imagining the democratic nation into being.

Note: Response pattern; simulated debate

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In ‘Retiring or Engaging’, Field points out that the retirement and detached spectatorship of Montaigne and Addison are themselves political positions, and that indeed many essayists have valued retirement as the condition of political effectiveness, allowing scope for the liberal conscience, dissent, and self-questioning. Detachment also allows, as in Montaigne’s own ‘Of Cannibals’, a stance of critical anthropology towards one’s own society. Field traces from ‘Of Cannibals’ the strain of the essay which critiques imperialism and slavery, passing through Hazlitt’s ‘On Reason and Imagination’, via Orwell, to James Baldwin and Lewis Nkosi. Hazlitt’s argument—that an essay’s political value can be found not in its argument, but in its evocative appeal to experience and imagination, thus encouraging readers to, in this case, imagine what it is like to be trapped in the hull of a slave ship—is also visible in the writings of Thoreau, Woolf, Baldwin, Nkosi, and Sontag, whose Regarding the Pain of Others combines in its title the essayist’s ‘aboutness’ (writing on the pain of others) with the problem of voyeurism and the necessity of taking suffering into account. Such essayists, Field shows, combine the ‘advice to princes’ tradition of the Baconian essay with the strategic indirection of Montaigne.

Note: Concealed catalyst; mimesis.

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Questions about the status of the essay as art or otherwise dominated three great Central European interventions in the theory of the essay in the early and mid twentieth century: György Lukács’s ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’ (1910), Robert Musil’s reflections on ‘essayism’ in his novel The Man without Qualities (1930–43), and Theodor Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958), a direct response to Lukács. Lukács dismisses the idea that any well-written non-fiction is an ‘essay’, and accords it instead a unique role in the literary array as giving form to the faintest and most evanescent moments of life; an intermediate form between poetry and philosophy, a kind of ‘intellectual poem’ which gestures towards the absolute truth of philosophy, science, and system without reaching it. Always a precursor, the essay emphasizes process over verdict or destination.79 Musil reiterated some of Lukács’s judgements, finding the essay’s domain ‘between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine’, in which ‘terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable’.80 Musil’s hero Ulrich adopts an ‘essayism’ based on Lukács’s account of the essay: a way of living which involves a resistance to system, taking experience hypothetically and assessing and weighing it from various angles, yet inconclusively.

Note: Essay as tentative personal philosophy for another to consider

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In Chapter 16, ‘Up to a Point’, Adam Phillips observes, conversely, how psychoanalysis has resisted expressing itself under the title of ‘essay’, for fear of being accused of purveying fiction, falling short of the status of a science and a profession—a worry about institutions and professionalism which, as we noted above, also besets academic writing on the essay. Yet the irony is that essayists such as Montaigne, Lamb, and Pater (the latter two of whom Phillips has edited) pioneered the charting of the unconscious and its un-methodical free associations. Here, the dominant theme of ‘association’ in the first half of the volume finds a further echo. Phillips instead argues for a kinship between the two terms of his title: ‘An essay, like a psychoanalysis, is an experiment without a proof.’ If some of the most interesting contemporary essays are being written by those who are sympathetic to psychoanalysis but sceptical of its claims to being a science and a profession—Phillips himself, Darian Leader, Jacqueline Rose, Janet Malcolm—that may be not only because they believe that psychoanalysis, like the essay, is an art rather than a science, but nonetheless not fictional; nor even only because it is the essence and tradition of the essay that it allows the wandering pen to match the zig-zags of the irrational mind; but also because the unconscious is recalcitrant to the authority of science and professionalism.

Note: Interesting to consider a Jungian approach to the essay, mental mapping via prose. Is the Red Book essayistic? Feels a bit too cryptic, but maybe? What about a form of essay where all experience is hallucinated day dreams?

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As Christy Wampole says in Chapter 17, ‘Dalí’s Montaigne’ (the last in the book), the essay has always been a form which shows the mind working not in rational discursive argument but via the rich but inchoate images one meets in dreams and objects. As the essay fulfils this quality in itself, it can leave the written word behind, taking advantage of new media and realizing itself in images or in text-image hybrids—whether the mixed photo-essays of Sebald and Rankine discussed by Wood and Stuckey-French, or the various essays in the media of drawing, photography, film, and video that have become a significant part of contemporary essayism.

Note: Or, prose itself can render sight

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All of these works, in different ways, bear traces of the influence of Surrealism, a movement with perhaps surprising affinities to the essay. Yet, in Agee and Walker Evans, Marker, and Bresland, such surrealism is closely allied to the everyday, the factual, and the artefactual. In these hybrid forms, technologically unimaginable from Montaigne’s perspective, we still find the unfolding patterns of family resemblance which mark the essay: association, experiment, experience.

Note: I like this framework a lot: associate, experiment, experience. The experiment is rhetorical scientific process of asking a question; experience is living the question; and associations are the thoughts that emerge in pursuit of an answer.

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Although two new and influential journals of the essay had been founded in the previous decade—Cabinet Magazine in 2000, and n+1 in 2004—and were joined in 2011 by Notting Hill Editions, a London publisher dedicated to essayistic writing, it was still notoriously difficult to sell books of essays. The past decade has, however, seen a substantial growth of interest in the essay among writers, readers, scholars, and publishers, making On Essays more timely than we expected; the title of Christy Wampole’s 2013 New York Times column, ‘The Essayification of Everything’, gives a sense of the sudden cultural centrality of a genre historically located on the margins.

Note: Early 2000s publishing

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Several exceptionally significant books of essays, or essayistic books, have recently been published, including Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (all 2014), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), Mark Greif’s Against Everything, and Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies (both 2016). The success, achievement, and vitality of work by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Olivia Laing, Hilton Als, Adam Phillips, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Eula Biss, Emilie Pine, and Jia Tolentino, suggests the resurgence of the form.

Note: Contemporary essayists

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Though detecting causes of such trends is hazardous, one condition may be the shift in media and its circulation from print to online, serving to soften the boundary between journalism and personal reflection, making opinion both easily accessible and speedily shared, and allowing distinctions between professional, expert, institutional, and private commentators to erode.

Note: Acknowledges the Internet

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Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1991), 3–23, here 4.

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Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (1995), 2.

Location 1012

In the preliminary material for a special issue entitled The Essay: An Attempt, A Protean Form, ed. Denise Gigante, Republics of Letters 4 (2014), available at http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/fora/essay-attempt-protean-form.

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See, for instance, Ullrich Langer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (2005), 3. We have not followed this strictly in this volume, however, since many of our contributors discuss Montaigne in his role as model for subsequent essayists.

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See Richard Scholar, Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking (2010), 67–8.

Location 1035

the liberating effect of Montaigne’s Essais on vernacular philosophy and individual thinking, see Warren Boutcher, The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe (2017).

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Hugh Walker, The English Essay and Essayists (1915), 2.

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Wolfgang Holdheim, The Hermeneutic Mode: Essays on Time in Literature and Literary Theory (1984),

Location 1067

Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (1978; 1979), 5.

Location 1074

John D’Agata (ed.), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009).

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Black, Of Essays and Reading, 24.

Location 1100

Ralph Johnson, The Scholars Guide from the Accidence to the University, or, Short, Plain, and Easie Rules for performing all manner of Exercise in the Grammar School (1665), 13–14.

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See Ian Michael, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (1987), 309–11, and Peter Womack, ‘What are Essays For?’, in English in Education 27.2 (1993), 42–8. 55 The argument in this paragraph is drawn from Womack’s in ‘What are Essays For?’.

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For the four-part structure—‘introduction, points for, points against, conclusion’—prevailing in British handbooks and the five-part American structure (‘introduction, three arguments, conclusion’) see Peter Mack, ‘Rhetoric and the Essay’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23.2 (1993), 41–9, here 41, 48, and n.13.

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See Gross’s ‘Introduction’ in The Oxford Book of Essays (1991), xxi–xxii.

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See also Tracy Chevalier (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Essay (1997). The most comparable volume to ours is Alexander J. Butrym (ed.), Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre (1989).

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e.g. Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (2006); Elbert N. S. Thompson, The Seventeenth-Century English Essay (1927); George S. Marr, Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century (1923); Thomas McFarland, Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (1987); David Russell, Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2017). Though not focused solely on essayists, Michael Hurley and Marcus Waithe (eds), Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (2018), contains several relevant studies. For briefer accounts, see Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘Not Being, but Passing: Defining the Early English Essay’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 10.2 (1977), 17–27; Robert DeMaria, Jr, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (2005), 527–48.

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See Erin Mackie (ed.), The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (1998); Denise Gigante (ed.), The Great Age of the English Essay (2008), on the eighteenth-century and Romantic essayists; Gertrude Himmelfarb (ed.), The Spirit of the Age (2009) on the Victorian essayists.

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See also de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit; Kuisma Korhonen, Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter from Plato to Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida (2006); Blau duPlessis, ‘f-Words’; Erin Plunkett, A Philosophy of the Essay: Scepticism, Experience, and Style (2018).

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For Gopnik on Montaigne, see The New Yorker, 16 January 2017;

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Rebecca Solnit, ‘Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable’, The New Yorker, 24 April 2014 (adapted from an essay in Men Explain Things to Me (2014), 85–108).

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