essay
| Short piece of non-fiction writing, often dealing with a particular subject from a personal point of view. The essay became a recognized form with the publication of Essais (1580) by French writer Montaigne and Essays (1597) by English politician, philosopher, and writer Francis Bacon. Today the essay is a part of journalism; articles in the broadsheet newspapers are in the essay tradition. |
History
English essayist Abraham
Cowley, whose essays appeared in 1668, brought a greater ease and freedom to the genre than it had possessed before in England, but it was with the development of periodical (weekly and monthly) literature in the 18th century that the essay became a widely-used form. Great essayists include the English Joseph
Addison and Irish Richard
Steele, who wrote the English newspapers
Tatler and
Spectator, and later, English Samuel
Johnson and Irish Oliver
Goldsmith. In North America the politician and scientist Benjamin
Franklin was noted for his essay style.
Critical essays
The English writer Charles
Lamb wrote a series of essays for the
London Magazine under the pseudonym ‘Elia’ from 1820; to the same period belong the English Leigh
Hunt, William
Hazlitt, and Thomas
De Quincey in England, French C A
Sainte-Beuve, and US Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry
Thoreau. From the 19th century the essay was increasingly used in Europe and the USA as a vehicle for literary criticism. The English writer William Hazlitt may be regarded as the originator of the critical essay, and his successors include English Matthew
Arnold and Edmund
Gosse. The English writer Thomas
Macaulay, whose essays began to appear shortly after those of Lamb, presents a strong contrast to Lamb with his vigorous but less personal tone.
Revival
There was a revival of the form during the closing years of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, in the work of Scottish writer Robert Louis
Stevenson, US Oliver Wendell
Holmes, French Anatole
France and Théophile
Gautier, and English Max
Beerbohm. The literary journalistic tradition of the essay was continued by US writers James Thurber, Mark Twain, H L Mencken and Edmund Wilson, and English Desmond MacCarthy, among others, and the critical essay was continued by English writers George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, and F R Leavis, and US writers T S Eliot (later a British citizen), Norman Mailer, John Updike, and others.
