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