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1 results

  • 43 - The Essay and the Public Intellectual

  • from Part V - The Essay and the Essayistic Today
  • Edited by Denise Gigante, Stanford University, California, Jason Childs
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the British Essay
    Published online:
    31 October 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024, pp 650-664

  • Summary

    This chapter explores how the essay, with its unlimited subject matter and the flexibility to address diverse audiences and ideas, provides public intellectuals with an invaluable and effective means of educating and challenging readers. It takes George Orwell as the model of the modern British public intellectual, someone whose interactive development as an intellectual and an essayist was fostered through numerous intellectual periodicals and magazines. It shows how four more recent essayists – Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Tariq Ali, and Mary Beard – adapt the Orwellian approach as polemicist and outsider. In distinct ways, public intellectuals extend and enliven the contemporary public sphere, ensuring that the essay remains critical to the collective exchange of opinion.