This chapter’s focus is the nineteenth century, at the moment of ascendency of the popular magazine in capitalist print culture, when the essay achieved new prominence as well as a somewhat altered function as a marketable vehicle for literary criticism aimed at a popular audience. Edgar Allan Poe in particular harnessed the essay’s power to articulate a unique aesthetic philosophy and influenced generations of poet-essayists and poet-critics. While literary artists such as Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass exemplified the many writers whose innovations appeared in what one might call the philosophical, political, or ruminative essay, Poe worked assiduously to found his literary reputation not only on his poetry but on an innovative form of the magazine essay as an exercise in expert aesthetic criticism. Poe’s work as a literary critic working in and editing commercial magazines helped reshape both the popular and the critical sense of the nature and potential of literary art, especially poetry, in the modern world in ways that remain vital, if controversial, to both poets and critics today.

This chapter focuses on the canonical essays that theorized in real time the new stylistic and thematic tendencies in American postmodern fiction. Since the late 1960s, prominent practitioners of postmodernist fiction have been at the forefront of critical debates over contemporary American narrative. From the 1960s to the 1990s, brilliant authors such as Raymond Federman, John Barth, Ronald Sukenick, and David Foster Wallace engaged in essayistic reflections on the problem of innovation in American fiction, including Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” and Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Despite differences and generational distance, in some of their best essayistic writing these writers often focused on the (old) problem of “the new” in art, reframed as a discourse on the making or unmaking of the postmodernist aesthetic in response to a supposed exhaustion of literary language. They did so from a liminal position, namely from the ambivalent stance of the writer-critic, and ended up producing some of the most penetrating essays on contemporary American literature during this period, indelibly marking an era in the history of the American essay.

This chapter features the contributions of influential and lesser-known essayists who have written persuasively and engagingly on gender and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Issues of identity and difference have had a profound effect on the writing of our age, and certainly on the essay, the most elusive of genres. This chapter considers the intersections of the essay, gender, and queer studies/consciousness over the last few decades, first in a general sense, and then through the lens of specific essayists who have had the most significant impact on the direction of the essay since 1970 in the United States. Beginning with second-wave feminism, this chapter discusses the work of those essayists in feminist and LGBTQ+ communities whose foundational writing on gender still resonates today. The chapter examines important essays that emerged from third- and fourth-wave feminism and then pursues the stylistic and thematic innovations brought by lesbian, gay, trans, and queer writers who have explored topics such as gender as performance, HIV and AIDS, misogyny and misandry, intersectionality, discrimination, and the medicalization and mediatization of desire.

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).

The chapter shows the outsize influence of the British periodical essay tradition, represented in publications like Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711– 12), on eighteenth-century American periodical essays. The British series presented themselves as the musings of fictional personae who lived in cities. The persona (almost always male) wandered about town, reflecting on what he observed and overheard in coffeehouses, streets, theaters, and other places of business or leisure. He was often diverted and sometimes frustrated by his fellow citizens; he also strived to enlighten with casual criticism of the arts or musings on the relevance of religion and history to everyday life. A pervasive, low-level irony was common in these writings. American essayists such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, and Judith Sargent Murray borrowed from the British model, customizing it for an American readership. The most original early American essay series sketch in their personae a knowing independence of mind amid a distracted and unreflective urban crowd, a rhetorical standpoint that paradoxically would come to define a newly nationalistic body of literature in the nineteenth century.

This chapter focuses on Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good (1710), in which Mather makes a series of proposals for how Christians might advance the gospel cause and exercise social benevolence. For this purpose, Mather creatively amalgamated different variants of the genre. First published anonymously in 1710 but quickly associated with Mather’s name, Bonifacius has often been considered an aesthetically and intellectually inferior predecessor of the American essay tradition, rather than its first full instantiation. Even so, the work enjoyed great popularity in the United States and Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin praised Bonifacius and acknowledged its importance in his early formation. This chapter investigates that connection and explores the relation between the sermon and the essay, dwelling on significant passages from Bonifacius and tracking its influence on a number of later philosophical and spiritual traditions.

This chapter analyzes Black writing from the leadup to the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, works that shored up the literate voice long denied to enslaved people, and explores how the pre-emancipation essay served to determine freedom. The century’s standout Black orator, Frederick Douglass, became a print phenomenon, advancing a strong first-person voice that spoke for the conscience of the nation. However, it was left to younger writers to tackle the meaning of freedom at a time when emancipation seemed like a hollow promise. The works of activist journalist Ida B. Wells highlight the synergy between investigative reporting and essay writing during the period. The chapter concludes by comparing the prose works of two towering figures: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. The ideological split in their views on civil rights is registered in their different writing styles, with Washington stressing action and advocacy and Du Bois embracing introspection and contemplation. Between them, these figures register the suite of oratorical, journalistic, and literary resources that will be bequeathed to twentieth-century practitioners of the African American essay.

This chapter focuses on the essays of Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller who used writing as a spiritual and philosophical tool. This special form of prose allowed them to write themselves, and thus Transcendentalism as a movement, into being, creating a flexible, open-ended, and experimental instrument for the radical self-fashioning of an emergent sensibility: the American individual as a freestanding soul, entire in (him)self, capable of encompassing all the potential of the cosmos. The resulting works forever stamped this most antinomian of genres with the Transcendentalist’s indelible signature. The chapter traces the movement back to Harvard College in the 1820s and ’30s, where students and faculty discussed spirituality, philosophy, and the art of writing. The chapter traces the influence of this convergence and of key figures like the Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing on the burgeoning movement. The chapter’s final pages highlight how central Transcendentalism has been to the American essay tradition, with writers today of greatly varying backgrounds absorbing its lessons and style into their own writing.

Starting in the early twentieth century, this chapter surveys the most significant essays about disability and essays written by writers with disabilities, including Helen Keller, Randolph Bourne, Paul K. Longmore, Leonard Kriegel, and Esmé Weijun Wang. Exploring the common themes and the rich variety of styles represented in these essays, the chapter synthesizes a wide array of firsthand experiences by people with blindness, polio, schizophrenia, deformities, multiple sclerosis, and other conditions. Some of these essays highlight the discrimination and exclusion faced by the authors – Longmore’s stories of the financial hardships he faced due to his disability are a particularly compelling example – while others craft a new poetics to describe the singularity and promise of a life lived with a disability. The chapter closes with contemporary essays that illustrate the extent to which the field of disability writing has greatly diversified in the twenty-first century, offering a more extensive record of human experience.

This chapter begins with the little magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ends with contemporary online literary magazines, highlighting the radical changes that have taken place as print yielded to digital culture. Motivated by the contrarian personalities of their founding editors against commercial tastes, small-circulation periodicals prioritized aesthetic experimentation and established themselves as an avant-garde force in the arts. During the twentieth century, literary magazines would become institutionalized and relinquish their financial and intellectual independence. Their avant-garde status, once represented by a collectively upheld editorial persona, would become overshadowed by individual cults of personality around popular writers. Magazines’ social programs would become watered down, and instead writers would make themselves into social actors. The arrival of New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s radically changed long-form journalism, rendering it more literary. The chapter ends with the contemporary literary magazine ecosystem, showing that what magazines have lost in materiality, they have gained in generic hybridity and global access.

This chapter focuses on the essayistic contribution of women writers before the American Civil War. Antebellum women exploited the essay’s openness to write in formats that conformed approximately to conventions of men’s writings but that took shape in host genres, frequently letters, or in generic hybrids as they negotiated gender prescriptions. Conduct manuals, schooling, and published lecture-essays advised on composing essays yet encouraged cultivation in cognate genres of conversation and the familiar letter, social “accomplishments” ceded as the sole literary “arts” in which women might excel. Conversational culture also spawned associations in which women circulated manuscripts and could offer access to periodical publishers in need of materials for audiences growing as literacy spread. Publishing compositions became almost a rite of passage for middle-class white women. Poverty and racist practices posed obstacles to education, publication, and fame for other women who nonetheless composed essays and published outside mainstream venues. They figure among those who produced an extensive body of essays whose range, merit, and impact remain inadequately acknowledged.

The essay film in the United States has not been thoroughly investigated, even if it has existed in the US cinematic landscape from the earliest years throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Beginning with early theories of the essay film that emerged from Europe, the chapter explores the relationships between American essay film and bordering forms like documentary, art film, and experimental cinema. The final pages of the chapter analyze the contributions of filmmakers belonging to the LA Rebellion and influenced by Third Cinema and conclude with a mention of newer forms like the video essay and desktop documentary.

Focused on twentieth-century art criticism, this chapter shows how critics and essayists such as Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Susan Sontag, and Michael Fried addressed the problems of medium and abstraction. The rise in the prominence of the essay on visual art during this period corresponds with the ascendancy of abstract representational painting and sculpture. It is as if the retreat from figuration opened a breach through which language – in the form of the essay – took up the role of advance guard. The essay enacted the experience of visual art rather than merely describing and judging it. In parallel with the proliferation of abstraction, writing on art turned away from representing the art object and toward the production of a self-sufficient experience. Pointing to nothing outside itself, the autonomous abstract work was matched by the essay attempting to become a wholly independent force of intellectual creation. The chapter traces how essayists responded to modernist and abstract art, and elucidates the role this writing played in settings such as art schools, magazines, museums, and other institutions that funded, displayed, and popularized the art of the day.

This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.