The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-3995-5710-8 (ISBN)
The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay distinguishes itself by the wide range and scope of its themes, voices and approaches. Thirty-five leading essayists, literary critics and writing instructors explore the essay from multiple perspectives, including its theories, forms and histories as well as its cultural, political and pedagogical contexts. In particular, the volume extends the theory of the essay by addressing topics such as the construction of an essayistic self and the political dimensions of essaying. It further explores the relationship between the essay and other forms, such as philosophical writing, the column, science writing, the novel, the lyric and the advert as well as the essay in digital spaces.
Mario Aquilina is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches and researches the essay, literary theory, Shakespeare and modernist literature. He has edited The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and authored The Event of Style in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Aquilina has published widely on literature, literary theory and the essay in book chapters and in journals such as Oxford Literary Review, Cahiers Elisabethains, CounterText, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies and electronicbookreview. Nicole B. Wallack is the Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program and Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. She is the author of Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies (Utah State UP, 2017). She is also a senior faculty associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College where she designs and leads professional development workshops and seminars for educators across disciplines and educational contexts. Wallack publishes and teaches in the fields of essay studies, writing studies, English education, and educational history. Bob Cowser Jr. is Professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, where he has taught courses in nonfiction writing, film and American literature since 1998. He is the author of three nonfiction books and editor of a fourth, most recently Green Fields, Crime Punishment and a Boyhood Between (UNO Press 2010), which won “Best Memoir 2010” from the Adirondack Center for Writers and was cited in Best American Essays. Cowser is also the editor of Why We’re Here: Essayists on Living Upstate (Colgate UP 2010) and serves as advisory editor to the online journal ASSAY: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.
List of Figures
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Mario Aquilina, Bob Cowser Jr and Nicole B. Wallack
Part I: Theories and Definitions
1. Affinities and Contestations: The Self and the Other in the Essay
Mario Aquilina
2. The Birth of the English Essay
Alan Stewart
3. The Problem of a Name: The Essay and Its Titles
Thomas Karshan
4. The Thing of the Essay
Erin Plunkett
5. Essay, Fiction, Truth, Troth
Jason Childs
6. The Essay as Resistance
Kara Wittman
7. ‘Lived’ Experience, ‘Sought’ Experience and the Personal Essay
Douglas Hesse
8. The Essay and the Advertisement
R. Eric Tippin
Contemporary Essayists in Focus
Rebecca Solnit
Claudia Rankine
Brian Dillon
Part II: Publics, Pedagogies and Histories
9. On Reading and the Essay
Nicole B. Wallack
10. Heretical Hearts and the Infinite Game: Why Teaching the Essay (Still) Matters
Bob Cowser Jr
11. The Essay and the Episteme: A Genealogy for Modern Classroom Use
Kevin Rulo
12. Commonplace Mysteries: Soaring on the Wings of Desire
Pat C. Hoy
13. Politics and the English Essay
Bruce Robbins
14. The Postwar American Essay, the Liberal Imagination and the Contemporary Essay
Phillip Lopate
15. Everybody’s Protest Essay: Personal Protest Prose on the American Internet
Briallen Hopper
16. Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Contemporary Women Essayists and Their Golden Moment
Jenny Spinner
17. The Essay in Asian (American) Contexts
Louise Kane
18. Beyond the Cocoon of Humanism: Essaying in the Ecological Turn Through Contradiction and Being Present
Sarah Allen
Contemporary Essayists in Focus
Leslie Jamison
Robert Atwan
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Part III: Form and Genre
19. On the Interface between Philosophy and the Essay: Foucault’s Essayistic Ethos
Kurt Borg
20. The Essay as Brinkmanship: Cioran’s Fragment, Aphorism and Autobiography
Arleen Ionescu
21. Science Essays
Dirk Vanderbeke
22. Columnism and Essayism Ivan Callus
23. The Lyric Essay: Truth-Telling Through Reader Participation
Beth Peterson
24. The New Seesaws of the Digital Visual Essay: Genre Provocations, Definitions and Tensions Beyond the Age of Print
Elizabeth F. Chamberlain
25. Archival Materials: Essayism as a Process of Witness, Care and Reckoning
Julija Šukys
26. The Essay as Trans Body
Glenn Michael Gordon
27. Why the (Animal) Essay Matters
Paolo Bugliani
Contemporary Essayists in Focus
David Shields
Jamaica Kincaid
Notes on Contributors
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 16.12.2025 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities |
| Zusatzinfo | 5 black and white illustrations |
| Verlagsort | Edinburgh |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 172 x 244 mm |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-3995-5710-6 / 1399557106 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-3995-5710-8 / 9781399557108 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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