This chapter examines the British essay in the age of the Internet, a period which has radically reshaped literary culture. Online magazines and journals now outnumber their print precursors, vastly increasing the venues available to budding essayists. But this transformation was predated by a more pivotal online trend: blogging. Beginning in the early years of the new millennium, and ending, effectively, with the rise of social media, the golden age of blogging allowed a wave of self-published writers to revolutionise literary criticism and cultural theory. Free from professional aims and ambitions, experimental and avidly personal, their essays left a lasting impression on both literary journalism and the academy. This chapter explores the underacknowledged possibilities and legacies of blogging, surveying the ways in which prominent bloggers reimagined the essay form.

This chapter explores the relationship of the adult essay with the ‘theme’, which was the name for school-essays until the mid-nineteenth century. Themes were, mostly, short prose pieces, focused on a moral subject which was also called a theme, written almost exclusively in Latin until English themes began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. The chapter argues that in the nineteenth century, the modern pedagogical essay emerged out of the Erasmian theme, combining many of its structures with the Baconian essay’s priority on individual experience and ideas. Meanwhile, the Romantic essayists, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, chief among them, created the modern literary essay by carrying forward the priority the theme assigned to rhetoric over experience, while on the other hand imitating Montaigne’s play with the oratorical structures of the theme, and with its subject (also called a ‘theme’).

This chapter discusses the poetics of familiarity embodied in the Romantic essay. It locates the origins of that poetics in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ of 1800 and 1802 to Lyrical Ballads. Responding in turn to the famous preface, the three most notable ‘familiar’ essayists of the era, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, revise a manifesto for poetry into one for prose, a celebration of nature into a proclamation of the city. In their practice, the familiar essay becomes the exemplary form of urban expression in the Romantic era. The characteristic procedure of the essay is the slide from the familiar to the ideal and back again, by directly articulating the ideal bearing of the familiar subject, or by a range of other idealising (and essayistic) strategies.

The review essay emerged in the seventeenth century and entered the publishing mainstream in the middle of the eighteenth, when Ralph Griffiths founded his Monthly Review, the first journal devoted entirely to book reviewing. But it was The Edinburgh Review that electrified the publishing world and put the review essay at the centre of British cultural and political life. Established in 1802, and edited by Francis Jeffrey, the Edinburgh exuded confidence, bristled with vitriol, celebrated Whiggism, and condemned injustice. Seven years later, Tories fought back with the founding of The Quarterly Review, edited by William Gifford, which set itself in opposition to the Edinburgh on all the major issues of the day. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was a more agile and belligerent Tory alternative to the Quarterly, but it gradually grew more moderate and in the 1830s was eclipsed by its most raucous imitator, Fraser’s Magazine.

Although there is no equivalent term for ‘essay’ in either Greek or Latin, ancient literature was instrumental to the development of the English essay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in three principal ways. First, some classical prose works provided stylistic models for early English essayists. Second, some ancient authors (Seneca in particular) processed information in a way that resonated with later essay writers; even if there were not ancient essayists, there were ancient ways of reading and writing that were fundamentally essayistic. And finally, the essay became one of the principal ways that readers gained access to ancient texts and ideas.

Aside from its intellectual content, the essay provides a space for contemporary British novelists to enhance their career prospects. This takes the threefold forms of intertexual affiliation by co-publication within the same title as other writers; of creating a space in which to generate prestige-enhancing controversy; and of enabling novelists to hold academic affiliations. This chapter examines these features through a network analysis of the publications in The London Review of Books over the past two decades and then through case studies of Hilary Mantel, Will Self, Tom McCarthy, and Zadie Smith.

The early essay in English was a fluid and malleable form. It was thus ‘fugitive’: it could be deeply topical, fleeting, and perishable, taking up the ephemeral and the occasional, and could easily travel across media from reader to reader given its portability. This chapter studies how writers exploited the affordances of the essay, first in seventeenth-century newsbooks and pamphlets, and then in early eighteenth-century periodicals. It retraces the origins of the English newsbook in a highly regulated media ecology, and examines the essayistic writings of Marchamont Nedham as a case study in stylistic innovation and rhetorical self-fashioning. During the era of licensing (1662–95) and the first decades of the eighteenth century, essayists continued to adapt the form, finding in the emergent print media of this period a ready site for politics and polemic.

Focusing on contemporary life writing of chronic pain, specifically lyric essays, this chapter explores the language of pain, refuting its untranslatability, and suggesting that creative forms and experimental expression are helping to develop language to meet experience. Recent illness narratives are building a common language with which to articulate their physical sensations, with Eula Biss’s ‘The Pain Scale’ (2005) encouraging a community of pain expression, and becoming a generative intertext. While pain sufferers reclaim their experiences, they are also reclaiming and renewing diagnostic vocabulary, for example through ‘subterfuge‘, which requires readers to better engage in attentive listening, with an ethical obligation not to overlook or mishear marginalized voices. Alongside Biss, this chapter explores the work of Amy Berkowitz, Molly McCully Brown, Anne Boyer, Sinéad Gleeson, Sonya Huber, and Lisa Olstein.

The Introduction frames a collection that makes the case for Pater’s importance for the study of English literature, bringing to the fore key themes and preoccupations and thus underlining the unity and coherence of the book. Discussion starts in 1886 when the Pall Mall Gazette asked writers, intellectuals, and educators to comment on the proposal by J. Churton Collins to establish a School of English at the University of Oxford; Pater’s writings on literature are looked at in the light of institutional debates and developments in literary criticism at this time. The Introduction explores in detail Pater’s commitment to what, in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, he calls ‘aesthetic criticism’, derived in part from German philosophical aesthetics, and what he intends by his stress on ‘style’ and ‘form’. Finally it looks at Pater’s conception of education as dialogic process, stemming in particular from Plato and Montaigne, and the role his use of the essay plays in that process; the case is made that Pater has much to offer us when we think about desirable forms of English Studies for today that are neither nationalistic nor exceptionalist but cosmopolitan.

The ability to respond critically to any text is a learnt ability which needs some innate ability before it can be developed. That is, critical thinking is a variegated talent, linked to intelligence and curiosity, which is hard-wired into the human brain but is not always fostered equally. We are all different according to aspects of biology, intelligence and personality. Likewise, we are all different according to our experience of being encouraged to use these natural abilities. Indeed, there is even some evidence that critical thinking is an ability that is only really developed at all after the teenage years. This idea is consistent with other theories of literacy, which state that there must be an inherent ability to decode language before it can be developed, and that any form of literacy is incremental. That means that each layer of literacy builds on previous levels, and that we must be cognitively ready for each stage. Critical literacy is, therefore, a higher level of literacy which builds on foundational forms of literacy. We need to be able to decode language systems at the semiotic, denotational and connotational levels in order to produce sense. Once we produce this meaning through textual reception, we can start to definitively question what we are being told, building on whatever latent critical ability we already have.

In this chapter, we address the aspects of style and presentation that students most commonly encounter in preparing their essays for submission. What may seem like minor details of writing, like ellipses, italics and quotation marks, are actually aspects of clarity. They explain in shorthand form the nature of your material and how you are using it. As with the referencing conventions we looked at in the previous chapter, common style conventions are understood by other academic readers and are part of engaging in an academic conversation. The chapter is organised A–Z by topic so that you can locate the information you need quickly and easily when you encounter a style query in the course of your writing. However, the unique circumstances of your own writing assignments means that you will occasionally have to make judgements about how to present your information.

In this chapter, we look at the key written form through which undergraduate students in the Humanities practise participating in this scholarly dialogue: the academic essay. Even where different disciplines have unique requirements for how information is delivered in an essay, Humanities essays share broad features such as their overall structure, thesis-driven argument and evidence-based argumentation. If you can master these foundational aspects, you can readily adapt your writing to meet different disciplinary contexts. Moreover, these same skills can be used in other types of academic writing that are not essays but which foreground argument just like the essay. This chapter is organised into three parts. It begins by looking at the essay as a distinct genre with recognisable conventions that support participation in scholarly dialogue. Next, it reviews the important steps that precede essay writing: breaking down the question, planning your argument and structure, and project managing your essay. The chapter covers the essentials of essay writing: the introduction, body paragraphs and conclusions.

Though primarily known and studied as a writer of fiction, Wallace was an avid reader and writer of nonfiction. This chapter explores the ways in which his nonfiction attempts to direct and sometimes complicates a reading of his fiction, as well as appraising the nonfiction in its own cultural context. The essay offers a taxonomy of Wallace’s nonfictional forms, connecting the work with his broader representational project for life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter works to interrogate Wallace’s creation of an authorial persona that created, sought to control and often undermined the extratextual persona of its author. Framing the essays as both complementing and challenging the fiction, this chapter assesses the “impervious sun” of the nonfiction as an important voice of the contemporary period in its own right.

This part of the book offers a guide to writing about poetry. It addresses the two main kinds of essay you might be invited to write about a poem – a commentary or close reading, and the more discursive essay – and shows how to manage them, from annotation, to planning, to constructing an argument, to editing and proof-reading.

Literary magazine culture of the 1880s created a rich environment for interrogating the relationship between masculinity, fiction and seriousness. Increasing diversity and eclecticism in periodicals promoted the conditions for experiment and the development of styles of self-conscious performativity, exaggeration, and irony that we might describe as ‘camp’. Reading Oscar Wilde’s essays and dialogues alongside work by Robert Louis Stevenson, James Payn, H.H. Johnston, and Andrew Lang, this chapter explores the interest of 1880s journalism in theatricality, artifice, gender inversion, and an aesthetic of pleasurably ‘failed seriousness’. It argues that the literary magazine, where – as one contemporary critic noted – ‘the style is the essay’, offers a platform for developing notions of identity as fluid performance and all literary forms as inevitable modes of pastiche. Lang’s He, a neglected parody of H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novel She, is revealed as a text that is both fascinated by contemporary debate regarding female higher education and enjoys unpicking the self-ironising and knowingly comic aspects of Haggard’s imperial quest narrative. Like so many other works of the 1880s, it uses anthropological and literary self-awareness to bring terms once associated with masculine authority into liberating play.