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2 - The Personal Essay

from Part I - Forms of the Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

Kara Wittman
Affiliation:
Pomona College, California
Evan Kindley
Affiliation:
Pomona College, California
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Summary

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.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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