This chapter engages various philosophical attempts to define and delimit the essay, and to use the form to do a kind of philosophy that became increasingly urgent in the shadow of twentieth-century atrocities. The author considers theories of the essay by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Walter Pater, and others.

This chapter locates the origin of the online essay in the era of the pre-commercial Internet, when communication occurred largely over message boards, forums, and listservs. The author then charts the history of the essay, and essays by women in particular, across a variety of platforms and publications, including personal blogs, the Huffington Post, Jezebel, and BuzzFeed, before concluding with an argument for the emancipatory political potential of the personal essay.

This chapter argues that the personal essay came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century, evolving from the familiar essay favored by writers such as Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf. Prior to the twentieth century, the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but only in a deliberately circumlocutory manner. But the pressure to constitute a stable self brought to bear by academic and other institutions gave rise to a new conception of the personal essay, and to confession more generally, as a vehicle of “spectacular personhood.”

The critical essay emerged in the eighteenth century in writing that described natural and artistic objects, and in the process inspired readers to think about the nature of their experience. This chapter traces the critical essay’s evolution from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination through the work of nineteenth-century essayists like Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, culminating in the academic literary criticism of New Critics such as I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and more recent practitioners such as D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

This chapter traces the history of the essay film from its origins in D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein (and theorizations by writers such as Hans Richter and Alexandre Astruc) to its manifestations in contemporary experimental cinema and video art installations such as John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. The author argues that the essay film is uniquely positioned to incorporate and respond to political and social crisis.

This chapter details how the essay form participated in changes in conduct, tact, and ways of living in nineteenth-century England, promoting an “ethics of unknowing” that was constantly subject to experimentation and revision. Particular attention is paid to essayists such as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, who continued the Montaignean tradition in ways that responded to the urbanized modernity of the capitalist metropolis.

This chapter asserts the influence of Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy on the early modern English essay, noting in particular how the Baconian commitment to scientific experiment and empirical investigation informed the work of early essayists such as Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and William Cornwallis. The author argues that the humanist form of the essay was also harnessed to the practical and utilitarian ends of managed state capitalism, including agriculture and political economy.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

The Cambridge Companion to the Essay considers the history, theory, and aesthetics of the essay from the moment it’s named in the late sixteenth century to the present. What is an essay? What can the essay do or think or reveal or know that other literary forms cannot? What makes a piece of writing essayistic? How can essays bring about change? Over the course of seventeen chapters by a diverse group of scholars, The Companion reads the essay in relation to poetry, fiction, natural science, philosophy, critical theory, postcolonial and decolonial thinking, studies in race and gender, queer theory, and the history of literary criticism. This book studies the essay in its written, photographic, cinematic, and digital forms, with a special emphasis on how the essay is being reshaped and reimagined in the twenty-first century, making it a crucial resource for scholars, students, and essayists.

This chapter argues that the European utopian tradition was significantly transformed by Latin American essayists in the early twentieth century. The author focuses on the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes, whose works were crucial in defining the notion of “the New World” as a postcolonial space, as well as on José Vasconcelos’s widely read utopian essay La raza cósmica (1925).

This chapter tracks the discourse around race, slavery, and racial Blackness in the Americas from the sixteenth century to the present day, with attention to the way the essay form has responded and contributed to the rise of new multiracial societies and struggles for emancipation and abolition. The author discusses how the work of abolitionist writers such as Lemuel Haynes, Ottabah Cugoano, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper has informed the subsequent tradition of Black essay writing in the United States and elsewhere.

This chapter offers a historical introduction to the origins of the essay in sixteenth-century France. It examines the role of memory in the early-modern essay and attempts to identify the mnemonic affordances of the essay form. The author compares the essays of Michel de Montaigne to those of his English successors, Francis Bacon and William Cornwallis.

This chapter traces multiple genealogies for the contemporary “lyric essay,” from the American memoir boom of the 1990s to the experimental writings of language poets, practitioners of postcolonial and Black diasporic thought such as Édouard Glissant and M. NourbeSe Philip, and writers who combine lyric and essayistic writing such as Claudia Rankine and Bhanu Khapil.

This chapter queries the notion of “the queer essay” and the idea of the essay as an intrinsically queer form. The author considers a particular tradition of essays in which “queer literary critics writ[e] about famous queer literary critics,” with emphasis on Terry Castle’s memoir of Susan Sontag, focusing on the desire for the writer to “come out” in an essay, a form by its very nature not interested in the full, disclosive out.

This chapter meditates on the genre of the photographic essay by considering the author’s own photographic essay on Caribbean culture and family histories. The author proposes that photography enables a different kind of attention, a different kind of knowing, and an attitude toward time that is itself essayistic.