This chapter argues that generic distinctions between the essay and the novel have historically been difficult to preserve, with many of the supposedly identifying features of each genre applying in practice to the other. The author surveys work by writers including Milan Kundera, Robert Musil, Zadie Smith, and Virginia Woolf.

This chapter proposes that the fostering of nonfiction by literary magazines including gorse and the Dublin Review has encouraged a number of writers to refine their nonfiction to a sophisticated literary form, something that might be described as “essayism,” following Brian Dillon’s 2017 book of the same name. Dillon describes essayism as “A form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure,” and “Not the practice merely of the form, but an attitude to the form – to its spirit of adventure and its unfinished nature – and towards much else.” In this chapter, I propose that essayism is an apt form in which to record the cultural expansiveness and orientation beyond Irish history or national boundaries in this particular strand of contemporary Irish writing. Dillon is something of a pioneer of essayism, and this chapter considers his writing in some detail, before reflecting on more recent works by Kevin Breathnach, Nathan O’Donnell, and Niamh Campbell, writers who take the form further than Dillon in certain respects, to include sex and the vulnerable body, humor, mockery and bathos, politics, and anger.