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  • 35 - The Radical Hybridity of the Lyric Essay

  • from Part IV - Toward the Contemporary American Essay (2000–2020)
  • Edited by Christy Wampole, Princeton University, New Jersey, Jason Childs
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the American Essay
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023, pp 597-611

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the development in the United States of the lyric essay (and, peripherally, essayistic poetry), with a focus on three contemporary writers: Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, and Maggie Nelson. Beginning with competing definitions of this hybrid genre whose contours are not always easy to discern, the chapter describes the role of American creative writing programs and the poetry classroom in the emergence of this special type of writing, which has gained ground in the early years of the twenty-first century. Examples from the lyric essays of Carson, Dillard, and Nelson are then read closely in an attempt to isolate the features unique to this genre celebrated by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall in their manifesto "New Terrain: The Lyric Essay" (1997).