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2 results

  • 3 - The Critical Essay

  • from Part I - Forms of the Essay
  • Edited by Kara Wittman, Pomona College, California, Evan Kindley, Pomona College, California
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to The Essay
    Published online:
    27 October 2022
    Print publication:
    03 November 2022, pp 49-63

  • Summary

    The critical essay emerged in the eighteenth century in writing that described natural and artistic objects, and in the process inspired readers to think about the nature of their experience. This chapter traces the critical essay’s evolution from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination through the work of nineteenth-century essayists like Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, culminating in the academic literary criticism of New Critics such as I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and more recent practitioners such as D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

The Cambridge Companion to The Essay
  • Edited by Kara Wittman, Evan Kindley
  • Published online:
    27 October 2022
    Print publication:
    03 November 2022
  • The Cambridge Companion to the Essay considers the history, theory, and aesthetics of the essay from the moment it's named in the late sixteenth century to the present. What is an essay? What can the essay do or think or reveal or know that other literary forms cannot? What makes a piece of writing essayistic? How can essays bring about change? Over the course of seventeen chapters by a diverse group of scholars, The Companion reads the essay in relation to poetry, fiction, natural science, philosophy, critical theory, postcolonial and decolonial thinking, studies in race and gender, queer theory, and the history of literary criticism. This book studies the essay in its written, photographic, cinematic, and digital forms, with a special emphasis on how the essay is being reshaped and reimagined in the twenty-first century, making it a crucial resource for scholars, students, and essayists.