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The Essay: Forms and Transform

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The Essay: Forms and Transformations

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he Essay has constituted an important prose form since the sixteenth century and opens up an intriguing fi eld for interdisciplinary study. Applied to such hetero-geneous writings as maxims, aphorisms and proverbs, letters and treatises, it has always eluded a clear defi ni-tion. Not surprisingly, literary and cultural studies have been reluctant to tackle what appears to be a random array of prose texts straddling the boundaries between literature, philosophy and scientifi c criticism and journalism.

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The Essay:Forms andTransformationsEdited bydorothea flothowmarkus oppolzersabine coelsch-foisner

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Table of Contents

SABINECOELSCH-FOISNERPrefatory Note: The Essay as Epistemic Genre.....................................................v

DOROTHEA FLOTHOW ANDMARKUSOPPOLZERIntroduction...........................................................................................................ix

I: The Origins of the Essay and Early Developments

WOLFGANGG.MÜLLERAn Elusive Genre?: An Attempt to Define the Essay ...........................................1

CHRISTOPHERCROSBIERefashioning Fable through the Baconian Essay: De sapientia veterumand Mythologies of the Early Modern Natural Philosopher ...............................15

HOLGERKLEINDiverse Strains in the Early English Familiar Essay:Peacham, Cowley, Temple ..................................................................................35

GLYN PURSGLOVEWilliam Thackeray's Bedside Book:James Howell's Epistolae Ho-Elianae and the Essay .........................................65

SARAHHERBEDryden's Prefatory Essays ...................................................................................79

MARIA-ANA TUPANEarly Modern Essays: The Harmonics of the Discourse of Authority................93

II: Case Studies: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

BÁLINTGÁRDOSMr. Spectator's Ambiguous Authority: The Position of the Speakerin the Early Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay ............................................111

TABLE OFCOTNENTSii

INGRIDKUCZYNSKI"Materials of Thinking":The Essay as a Medium in the Debate on Travel ..............................................129

DAVID FOSTERMill versus Carlyle:The Rise of Materialism and the Defeat of the Romantic Ideal........................143

ANNE FERTIG"Ancient, Hardy, Pugnacious, and Poor": Margaret Oliphant's Formand Conformation in "Scottish National Character" and Kirsteen....................159

WOLFGANGG.MÜLLERGeorge Orwell's Essayistic Prose ......................................................................171

MEHMETBÜYÜKTUNCAYThe Essay as a Form of Radical Critique:Negation and Immanent Utopia in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory ........................185

GULSHANR. TANEJASontag: Essayist .................................................................................................195

III: Case Studies of the Political Essay:Feminist and Eco-critical Agendas

INGRID VONROSENBERGThe Essay as an Instrument in the Long Fight for Women's Emancipation .....213

NÓRA SÉLLEIPower and Female Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas ................229

DANICAMALEKOVAEco-morality Narratives in Atwood's Essays ....................................................241

KATARINA LABUDOVAMargaret Atwood's Ecological Essays:Moral and Environmental Anxieties..................................................................253

SUHASINIVINCENTThe Call for Political Transparency and Ecocritical Activismin Arundhati Roy's Political Essays...................................................................265

TABLE OFCONTENTS iii

MILADA FRANKOVÁWomen Novelists' Essays for the Twenty-first Century ...................................277

IV: The Essay in Specific Cultural Contexts

PARVIN LOLOIEssay Writing in the Islamic World ..................................................................289

VELI-MATTI PYNTTÄRIThe Contemporary Finnish Essay and the Question of Genre:Notes towards the Essay as Social Action.........................................................303

RIMABERTAŠAVIČIŪTĖThe Lithuanian Essay: A Form of Misreading and a Case of Identity..............317

Notes on Contributors........................................................................................333

PREFATORYNOTE: THE ESSAY AS EPISTEMICGENRESABINECOELSCH-FOISNER

In a transdisciplinary book series bearing the title Wissenschaft und Kunst, theessay seems to be a prime genre to showcase how the arts and the sciencescomplement or engage with each other, and how they shape and reflect ourgrasp of the world. The idea to host a conference on the essay had long been onthe agenda of the editors and resulted in two conventions held at SalzburgUniversity in 2012 and 2014. The range of writers proposed and the scope ofgeneric styles as well as political, philosophical, critical and historical issuesaddressed confirmed our endeavour to revisit a genre so profusely scatteredacross periods and practitioners and so apparently elusive to systematicmapping. Hence an overarching concern in the papers brought together in TheEssay: Forms and Transformations is the formal and thematic elasticity of theessay: its genre dynamics and the ways in which the form is a way of thinking.In individual case studies from over five centuries, the papers collected underthis rubric address issues of art, politics, women's emancipation and humanrights, morals, cultural identity, travelling, and ecology. The connections be-tween literary and cognitive practices have profound implications for under-standing the structures and methodologies of knowledge cultures. As such, theemphasis of the present volume on the inscription of cognitive processes andstrategies of persuasion in forms of literacy is apt to shed new light on theepistemic quality of the essay – and more widely on the epistemic relevance ofliterature.Long deemed unworthy of serious study, the essay is still underrepresented in

academic debates and publications, as Dorothea Flothow and Markus Oppolzersummarise in their introductory survey of the state of research on the essay. Toaddress this gap in the critical record, the present collection brings togetherscholars from Austria, Britain, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany,Hungary, India, Lithuania, Rumania, Slovakia, Turkey and the USA. To meetthe diversity of topics addressed by essayists from over 500 years and from suchdiverse cultural backgrounds as Europe, Canada, Persia and India, the ap-proaches include literary-historical, feminist, postcolonial, (inter-)cultural andcomparative, linguistic, semiotic, rhetorical and philosophical perspectives.Together, these individual efforts to define and map the essay suggest thecentrality of the genre for current debates about knowledge production andknowledge transfer. Foregrounding observation, process, enquiry and inter-rogation, as well as certain ways of looking at the world, the essay constitutes asource of knowledge, intimately connected with experience, empiricalobservation and learning. The essay matters both as a literary and as anepistemic genre.

SABINECOELSCH-FOISNERvi

The latter concept was originally used in medical science and the history ofmedicine to refer to the so-called Observationes – medical case histories thatemerged in Renaissance humanistic medicine.1 The observation and the essayoriginate in the same period,2 and there are obvious generic parallels betweenessay writing and these early case-studies, given their cognitive goals and the"unprecedented emphasis on practice as a source of knowledge", with the"authorial identity projected by the writers […being] that of the learned andexperienced observer".3 Yet, the epistemological value of observation, whileattached to the medical case study, still needs to be acknowledged in respect ofthe essay. For "thinking in cases", to use John Forrester's phrase, constitutes "abasic cognitive process".4 Though not confined to observation, the essay is aform of 'thinking in cases', i.e. of thinking about something that already exists –about particulars rather than universals.The didactic task phrase 'Write an essay about …', which every reader

remembers from their earliest schooldays, has contributed to the essay's lowesteem as a full-fledged literary genre; and yet, the formula pinpoints a principalquality of the essay: its being about something. As several papers in thiscollection argue, essayists think about actual things; the essay builds onsomething pre-existing; it is indebted to oratory and debate; it constitutes 'aunique vehicle of ideas'; it balances art and science; it embodies experience(Christopher Crosbie, Gulshan R. Taneja, Danica Malekova, MehmetBüyüktuncay). While all of these suggestions are refracted through the prism oftime and a culture's or particular writer's values, truth-claims and aesthetic

1 See Gianna Pomata's seminal work on epistemic genres, a term actually credited to herstudies in medical history: "Observation Rising: Birth of an Epistemic Genre, ca. 1500-1650", in Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, ed., Histories of Scientific Observation(Chicago: Chicago UP, 2011), pp. 45-80; and "The Recipe and the Case: Epistemic Genresand the Dynamics of Cognitive Practices", in Kaspar von Greyerz, Silvia Flubacher, andPhilipp Senn, ed., Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Geschichte des Wissens im Dialog /Connecting Science and Knowledge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp.131-54.

2 As a form of enquiry embodying mental processes, its pedigree reaches beyond Renais-sance humanism, as Christopher Crosbie's study of the fable, Glyn Pursglove's focus onclassical sources, and Parvin Loloi's study of Islamic contexts for example suggest.

3 Pomata, "Sharing Cases: The Observationes in Early Modern Medicine", Early Scienceand Medicine 15 (2010), pp. 193-236, p. 193, <DOI: 10.1163/157338210X493932> (6 Feb2017).

4 Quoted in Pomata, "The Medical Case Narrative: Distant Reading of an Epistemic Genre",Literature and Medicine 32:1 (2014), pp. 1-23, p. 2, Project MUSE (6 Feb. 2017). See alsoMary S. Morgan, "Case Studies: One Observation or Many? Justification or Discovery?",Philosophy of Science 79:5 (2012), pp. 667-77, p. 667, JSTOR (6 Feb. 2017). For hisoriginal article, see John Forrester, "If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases", History of theHuman Sciences 9:3 (1996), pp. 1-25.

PREFATORYNOTE vii

predispositions, they do not prejudice the 'essayistic manner',5 i.e. the essay'saffiliation with history and change, whether in the form of women's liberation,ethics, ecology, human rights, the arts and culture, global politics and worldaffairs, or trivial aspects of everyday life. The essay is about something given,even though it 'may not respect that given'6 and may, as distinct from scientifictreatises, refrain from charting facts and data. Like the Observationes, the essaydoes not record an already completed thought process, but charts "a way ofthinking, and thinking with a specific purpose in mind."7The essay's quality of aboutness compels us to re-assess both its generically

hybrid or amorphous status in the history of writing and its legacy as an epis-temic genre – whether practitioners and critics have foregrounded its genericproximity to the short story and the fable (Christopher Crosbie) or the (bio-graphical) preface (Sarah Herbe), to the novel (Nóra Séllei) or to travel writing(Ingrid Kuczinsky) and reportage (Wolfgang G. Müller), to such diverse proseforms as the aphorism, the letter or epistle, the dialogue, the character, themaxim and the meditation (Wolfgang G. Müller, Holger Klein, Glyn Pursglove),the treatise, the lecture or talk (Milada Franková), or to the memoir and 'com-panion text' (Katarina Labudova). Such shifting demarcations and affiliations gofar beyond the essay as a literary genre. They encapsulate changing epistemo-logical rifts in conceptualising cerebration and imagination, history, truth andknowledge, the personal and the public, taxonomical and procedural knowledge.By addressing essayists from the early modern period until the present, the

authors brought together in this volume rivet our attention to the ways in whichessayists have negotiated the epistemological boundaries of art (Kunst) andscience (Wissenschaft). They offer profound insights into the properties andexigencies of cultural traditions (Holger Klein, Maria-Ana Tupan, Anne Fertig,David Foster, Veli-Matti Pynttäri) and into the connections between knowledgeand literature, both in Western contexts and in Islamic cultures, where traditionsof essayistic writing pre-date the early modern essay (Parvin Loloi). A centralquestion in all essays is how topical issues and ideas filter into particular stylesand tones of writing. The scope ranges from warning to satire, from wit andparody to prophecy and advocacy. Accordingly, the essay has been described asa mode of both adopting and circumventing authority (Bálint Gárdos, MiladaFranková, Rima Bertašavičiūtė); as a challenge of the status quo of powerpolitics and 'a form of non-violent dissent to change the world' (Suhasini

5 Cf. Ingrid von Rosenberg's article in this volume: "The Essay as an Instrument in the LongFight for Women's Emancipation", pp. 213-227, and Wolfgang G. Müller's reading ofGeorge Orwell's essayistic prose, pp. 171-183

6 Gulshan R. Taneja, "Sontag: Essayist", pp. 195-210.7 Pomata on epistemic genres, "The Medical Case Narrative: Distant Reading of anEpistemic Genre", p. 9.

SABINECOELSCH-FOISNERviii

Vincent); as a 'potent carrier of post-conventional morality' (Danica Malekova),as a prototype of inductive empiricism (Christopher Crosbie) and a reservoir ofideas (Nóra Séllei).In the light of current debates on knowledge production in the liberal arts,

such designations accord the essay a key position as an epistemic genre, i.e. asan agent of transmitting mental processes – not despite its status as literature, butbecause it shares with literature (in varying degrees) such features as voice andmodal variety, imagery, contemplation, process and appeal to the reader. In theessay, the production of meaning goes along with the production of knowledge.Hence to re-assess the interconnectedness of literary strategies and their perlo-cutionary role along with modes of cognition, such as habits of mind, inclina-tions and preferences, in the context of particular case-studies from the sixteenthuntil the twenty-first century is the rationale of The Essay: Forms andTransformations. It strikes me as a rationale that has great potential in re-assessing the creative value of literature and the liberal arts in contemporaryculture.

Salzburg, January 2017

Introduction

DOROTHEA FLOTHOW ANDMARKUSOPPOLZER

Unlike other, closely related genres – such as the short story or the novel1 – theessay is currently suffering from considerable scholarly neglect. For instance,while there are many volumes of Routledge's New Critical Idiom series dealingwith such diverse genres as travel writing, comedy, autobiography and even theallegory, none exists on the essay.2 The disregard for this textual form isparticularly noticeable in literary and cultural studies, for while there arenumerous Cambridge Companions and Blackwell Companions whose titlesreveal a particular interest in the novel and in the short story, the only Cam-bridge Companion on the essay, examining John Locke's Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding (2007), is part of the The Cambridge Companions toPhilosophy, Religion and Culture series3 and, therefore, does not engage withthe essay as a genre as such.4Considering both the essay's long pedigree – it is generally thought to emerge

as early as 1580, when Michel de Montaigne published his volume Essais5 –, itsmany famous practitioners ranging from Sir Francis Bacon and John Dryden to

1 While the claim that the three genres are closely related may initially seem surprising – thenovel and the short story, unlike the essay are, after all, fictional genres, whereas the essayis often subsumed under the term "creative non-fiction" (see e.g. Susan M. Hertz, WriteChoices: Elements of Nonfiction Storytelling [Washington DC: CQ, 2015]) – this claim hasbeen made in several studies. See e.g. for the close relationship of the essay and the novelPeter Zima, Essay / Essayismus: Zum theoretischen Potenzial des Essays: Von Montaignebis zur Postmoderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012); or Stefano Ercolino,The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947. Studies in European Culture and History (New York /London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which examines a genre between the essay and thenovel, flourishing in early twentieth-century France, Germany and Austria. On the closeties between the essay and the short story see Ralf Kellermann, "Einleitung", RalfKellermann, ed., Der Essay: Texte und Materialien für den Unterricht (Stuttgart: PhilippReclam, 2012), pp. 5-12, p. 5; and the article "The Essay: A Form of Misreading and aCase of Identity" by Rima Bertašavičiūtė in this volume (pp. 331-45).

2 See Routledge's webpage on the Critical Idiom-series <https://www.routledge.com/series/SE0155> (26 Nov. 2015).

3 See Lex Newman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Locke's 'Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding' (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).

4 In volumes on individual authors, however, articles on the essay can be found. See forinstance William C. Cain, "Orwell's Essays as a Literary Experience", John Rodden, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 76-86.

5 See for instance John Gross, "Introduction", The Oxford Book of Essays, ed. John Gross(Oxford: OUP, 1991), p. xix; as well as Wolfgang G. Müller's article "An Elusive Genre? –An Attempt to Define the Essay" in this volume (pp. 1-14).

DOROTHEA FLOTHOW&MARKUSOPPOLZERx

Richard Steele, Henry James and Sir Winston Churchill,6 as well as itscontinuing relevance and widespread use in particular in newspapers and atuniversities,7 this scholarly neglect is rather surprising.Yet it has been suggested that it is precisely the current proliferation that goes

a long way towards explaining scholars' reluctance to tackle the essay.8 Atuniversities and other institutions of higher and further education, apart frombeing a form of scholarly presentation, the essay has an important function inteaching. It is the prime means by which students are instructed to write well.However, the focus is primarily on language as well as on research and the man-aging of information. Essays are typically taught to consist of individual well-structured sentences and paragraphs. It is the concern for strong verbs, precisenouns, coherence and cohesion, short, expressive topic sentences and goodexamples that is central, rather than the genre as such.9 Through the use of theessay, students are taught good writing, rather than to write good essays.According to Alexander J. Butrym, this 'exploitation' of the essay – for instanceits considerable popularity amongst journalists, who use the essay to producewell-paid, opinionated features – has contributed to its low status amongstscholars of literature:

In relegating essays to the role of models for students to imitate in freshman compo-sition […] English departments over the years have gradually and quietly excluded theessay from serious, literary study and have in effect 'abandoned' the genre.10

As a primarily functional genre that has lost its ties to true, self-sufficient 'Liter-ature',11 Butrym claims,12 the essay has fallen out of the interest of many literaryscholars.The essay's long history may, in fact, also hinder rather than further its

attractiveness, as Graham Good has suggested. For in comparison to the novel or

6 See the collected essays in John Gross, ed., The Oxford Book of Essays.7 A quick search in any major library catalogue, for instance the British Library's, revealsthousands of essays, including many recent ones.

8 See Alexander J. Butrym, "Introduction", Alexander J. Butrym, ed., Essays on the Essay:Redefining the Genre (Athens / London: The U of Georgia P, 1989), pp. 1-8, passim.

9 See for instance the textbooks by Patrick McMurray, Study Skills Essentials: OxfordGraduates Reveal Their Study Tactics, Essay Secrets and Exam Advice (Holywood,Northern Ireland: Effective Study Skills Publications, 2011); Richard Aczel, How to Writean Essay. Uni-Wissen Anglistik / Amerikanistik (Stuttgart: Klett, 2014); Dorothy Zemachand Lisa Rumisek, Academic Writing: From Paragraph to Essay (Oxford: Macmillan,2005); Stephen Bailey, Academic Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).

10 Butrym, p. 4. A similar point is again made in George Douglas Atkins, Tracing the Essay:Through Experience to Truth (Athens, GA / London: U of Georgia P, 2005), p. 2.

11 For the purist, true 'Literature', after all, has no functionality.12 Butrym, p. 2.

INTRODUCTION xi

the more recent term 'creative non-fiction', which may also encompass the essay,the term itself is often felt to be eminently old-fashioned:

This conjures up the image of a middle-aged man in a worn tweed jacket in an armchairsmoking a pipe by a fire in his private library in a country house somewhere in southernEngland, in about 1910, maundering on about the delights of idleness, country walks,tobacco, old wine, and old books, blissfully unaware that he and his entire culture areabout to be swept away by the Great War and Modern Art.13

This image of the essay, however, as Good also argues, is both wrong and un-fair, for both modernist and postmodernist authors and intellectuals have madeuse of the form, so that it can hardly be called 'old-fashioned'.Its scholarly neglect may of course also be the result of the low status, its

"'second-class' citizenship", as E. B. White described it, that the essay has longbeen credited with.14 An essay is, after all, a mere 'attempt'. It is usually short –"the essay can often be read in one sitting"15 – and therefore possesses lessweight than the novel or the epic, whose length alone gives them more credit.The essay's prose is often described in "terms such as 'disjointed' and 'broken'that clearly distinguish essayistic form and purpose from the methodical dis-course that dominated classical rhetoric and medieval scholasticism".16 Scholarsoften create a dichotomy between "methodical discourse and essayistic ram-bling".17 While its frequent subjectivity is celebrated by some, its lack ofobjectivity is equally often deplored. Though, as Carl H. Klaus shows, manyessayists have made virtues of these reproaches over the centuries, invoking forinstance "images and metaphors suggestive of the essay's naturalness, openness,or looseness", stressing its "seemingly freer form",18 though the essay has beencelebrated as a genre giving a voice to minority groups,19 though its importanceas a means of inquiry has been emphasised,20 until today, it is often felt to pos-sess less gravitas, to be less worthy of scholarly attention than other, longerliterary forms.21 On the other hand, considering the many prestigious authors

13 Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London / New York:Routledge, 1988), p. viii.

14 Quoted in: Atkins, Tracing the Essay, p. 11. Cf. also Atkins, pp. 9-25 for the following.15 Ibid., p. 11.16 Carl H. Klaus, "Towards a Collective Poetics of the Essay", Carl H. Klaus and NedStuckey-French, ed., Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (Iowa City: U ofIowa P, 2012), pp. xv-xxvii, p. xvi.

17 Ibid., p. xix.18 Ibid., p. xv and p. xvii.19 See also the article by Suhasini Vincent in the present collection (pp. 265-276).20 See Good, p. 10; and Danica Malekova's "Eco-morality Narratives in Atwood's Essays" inthis volume (pp. 241-251).

21 See also Gulshan R. Taneja's article in this collection on this point (pp. 195-210).

DOROTHEA FLOTHOW&MARKUSOPPOLZERxii

who have written essays, it can hardly be described as a 'popular' genre properand therefore also largely escapes the interest of many practitioners of CulturalStudies, whose interest often lies in truly 'popular' genres.Another reason for the marked neglect of the essay may lie in the great diffi-

culty literary scholars have encountered when attempting to define the genre.While it seems to have become standard in most attempts to stress the difficultyof pinning down literary modes,22 in relation to the essay, this complaint isparticularly strong. Thus, O. B. Hardison, Jr. even claims: "Of all literary formsthe essay most successfully resists the effort to pin it down, which is like tryingto bind Proteus".23 Similarly, John Gross has written in the introduction to TheOxford Book of Essays: "Essays come in all shapes and many sizes. […] Evenmore than most literary forms, the essay defies strict definitions. It can shadeinto the character sketch, the travel sketch, the memoir, the jeu d'esprit."24 Interms of contents, essays can cover topics ranging from the lofty (liberty,avarice, death) to the mundane (moths, potato crisps, films);25 it shares similari-ties with many other genres (sketches, prefaces, short stories, novels, prosepoems, etc.);26 its style can include loftiness or chattiness, familiarity or dis-tance;27 its purpose may range from instruction to entertainment or persuasion.28Even its frequently short length cannot really serve as a definitive characteristicas prominent examples – such as John Locke's An Essay Concerning Humane

22 On the problems of genre definition see e.g. David Duff, "Introduction", David Duff, ed.,Modern Genre Theory (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 1-24; or Birgit Neumann and AnsgarNünning, "Einleitung: Probleme, Aufgaben und Perspektiven der Gattungstheorie undGattungsgeschichte", Marion Gymnich, Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, ed.,Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007),pp. 1-28. For examples of studies stressing the problems of defining their specific genresee for instance Stefan Schenk-Haupt, "Die Einteilung der literarischen Gattungen und dieProblematik der Lyrik", in ibid., pp. 116-36, p. 117; or Teresa Grant and BarbaraRavelhofer, "Introduction", Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer, ed., English HistoricalDrama, 1500-1660: Forms Outside the Canon (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave /Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1-31, p. 1.

23 Hardison, Jr., "Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay", in Butrym, ed., Essays on theEssay: Redefining the Genre (Athens / London: U of Georgia P, 1989), pp. 11-28, p. 11.

24 P. xix. On the problems of defining the essay see also Wolfgang G. Müller's first contribu-tion in this collection (pp. 1-14).

25 See the examples collected in the Oxford Book of Essays.26 See e.g. Kellermann; Zima; Good, or Müller.27 Nevertheless, a certain familiarity or informality in style has also been suggested as acriterion for definition. See Kellermann.

28 Indeed, in his recent study of the essay Peter V. Zima uses these last two characteristics ofthe essay, its formal openness and its many purposes for a definition of the essay as an'intertext', "der im Prinzip Textelemente aller literarischen und nichtliterarischen Gattungenannehmen und gestalten kann […]" (p. ix).

INTRODUCTION xiii

Understanding (1689) – show.29 Considering the origins of the essay – the term"essai", after all, "suggests a piece of writing that tends towards or away fromrespectability [and] formality"30 –, this lack of clear shape is hardly surprising;and of course its long history does not make the task of defining the genre anyeasier.31 Potentially, then, the list of texts any study of the genre can or must in-clude is vast and its borders are fluid32 – a situation not enjoyed by literaryscholars trying to define a homogenous corpus.

Of course, excellent studies on the essay undoubtedly exist.33 Yet many of these,and this is especially true of recent monographs and collections, rather thancovering the genre broadly, confine themselves to very specific aspects of theessay. Thus, a search in the British Library Catalogue reveals several studies thatconcentrate on one author and his or her work only. Virginia Woolf orMontaigne, for instance, are prime exponents here, who are celebrated and ana-lysed in numerous studies.34 Alternatively, the essay with a specific function, forinstance as political commentary, or within a specific context is another frequentfocus.35 Thus, a recurring topic is, for instance, the liberating potential of theessay for previously suppressed ethnic or social groups.36 The importance of theessay as a form of public discourse in newly emerging, or recently independent,nations is another key point of interest.37Amongst the more general studies of the genre are Peter Zima's Essay /

29 See on this point Zima, p. 1.30 Butrym, p. 2.31 On the problems of historical genre dynamics for genre definitions see Neumann /Nünning, p. 10.

32 On this issue see for instance Gross, "Introduction".33 The comparative scholarly neglect of the essay is thus not a permanent phenomenon. Inother periods, such as the 1920s, the essay was a far more popular topic of academicinterest.

34 See e.g. Randi Saloman, Virginia Woolf's Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012);Elena Gualtieri, Virginia Woolf's Essays: Sketching the Past (Basingstoke: Macmillan,2000); or Deborah N. Losse, Montaigne and Brief Narrative Form: Shaping the Essay(Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

35 See e.g. Carsten Junker, Frames of Friction: Black Genealogies, White Hegemony and theEssay as Critical Intervention (Frankfurt: Campus, 2010); Kathleen Mary Glenn andMercedes Mazquiarán de Rodríguez, Spanish Women Writers and the Essay: Gender,Politics, and the Self (Columbia, MO; London: U of Missouri P, 1998); Ruth-EllenBoetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman, ed., The Politics of the Essay: FeministPerspectives (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993).

36 The following point will also be stressed by several contributions to the volume. See inparticular sections II and III.

37 See also the section "The Essay in Specific Cultural Contexts" in this collection for furtherexamples.

DOROTHEA FLOTHOW&MARKUSOPPOLZERxiv

Essayismus (2012), which defines the essay as an "Intertext", and thus a formbeyond genre classification (p. ix), making a virtue of its generic hybridity,which is often perceived as a problematic feature. Also using a more generalapproach to the essay as a genre is George Douglas Atkins's On the FamiliarEssay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies (2009),38 which not only celebratesthe essay's "glories, its opportunities and potential" (p. ix), but also offersinsights into one of the sub-genres of the essay (i.e. the familiar essay) and ananalysis of some of its previously neglected practitioners.39 Last but not least, inrecent years, several anthologies of famous essays have been published, whichprovide overviews over the genre as well as attempts at canonisation: forinstance, John Gross's The Oxford Book of Essays (1991), which also includes avery useful introduction; John D'Agata's The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009),40which argues for a pedigree of the essay far older than Montaigne; Essayists onthe Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French(2012), which contains famous essayists' meta-essays;41 or Phillip Lopate's TheArt of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present(1997).42 Of infinite value for any student of the essay is also the Encyclopediaof the Essay, edited by Tracy Chevalier,43 which contains entries by aninternational board of writers not only on famous (as well as now forgotten)essayists and essays, but also on different sub-genres. It also includes entries onthe essay tradition in different countries. In spite of these, and further studiesthat concentrate on individual writers and specific aspects, amply documented inthe individual papers,44 the essay is still a genre that leaves much to bediscovered and that invites new research perspectives, as its inclusion in thebook series Wissenschaft und Kunst suggests.

The present collection testifies to the many research opportunities opened by theessay – primarily in literary and cultural studies, but also for linguists, philoso-phers and many other disciplines. It presents selective articles on the genre fromits beginnings in the early modern period till today, which reflect the genre's

38 George Douglas Atkins's On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

39 George Douglas Atkins has published further studies of the essay, including Tracing theEssay: Through Experience to Truth.

40 John D'Agata, The Lost Origins of the Essay (Saint Paul: Greywoolf, 2009).41 Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, ed., Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to OurTime (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2012).

42 Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to thePresent (New York: Anchor, 2009).

43 Tracy Chevalier, ed., Encyclopedia of the Essay (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997).44 For further literature on the essay see also the extensive footnotes in the essays in thisvolume.

INTRODUCTION xv

changing interconnections of form and content and the uses to which it has beenput.To this end the volume is divided into four sections, following chronological

and thematic criteria. The first of these contains articles examining the originsand early developments of the genre. Here, classics, such as Sir Francis Bacon,as well as often neglected authors, like James Howell, find a place and areanalysed from new angles, and read against the grain of such establishedtheoretical approaches. A central issue in this section is the attempt to define theessay vis-à-vis other genres not commonly compared with it, such as the preface.Section II, "Case Studies: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century", tracesthe further developments of the essay, including many classics, such as GeorgeOrwell, and largely forgotten writers, like Mary Astell or Judith Drake.Continuing the task of defining the essay – which is indeed a red thread runningthrough the contributions of this volume – several chapters also highlight thegreat potential of the essay as a genre that gives a voice to less privileged socialgroups.The particular ability of the essay to voice new ideas and sense 'structures of

feeling' is emphasised in the final two sections of the volume, "Case Studies ofthe Political Essay: Feminist and Eco-critical Agendas" and "The Essay inSpecific Cultural Contexts". With examples ranging from the eighteenth-centuryproto-feminist essay to early twenty-first century essays commenting on cultureand creativity, Section III concentrates on two prominent political uses of theessay, combining insight and action. Section IV argues for the importance of theessay in largely sidelined traditions beyond the Anglo-American mainstream,ranging from essays in the Islamic world, where the essay has several earlypredecessors, to the essay in Northern Europe, where it has been central inshaping national identities.

With his first contribution, "An Elusive Genre? – An Attempt to Define theEssay", Wolfgang G. Müller opens Section I by offering an attempt to define theessay, that "Mona Lisa of literary genres". Arguing for a non-normativedefinition that includes both the more personal tradition started by Montaigne aswell as the aphoristic quality of Bacon's essays, Müller yet stresses the necessityof clear genre boundaries. He first suggests a catalogue of characteristics,45 andthen compares the essay to other, early modern literary forms of philosophicaldiscourse: the letter, the dialogue and the aphorism. Though Müller, too, con-cludes that the essay is a flexible and diverse genre, he argues that a morenarrow definition than that of "a piece of non-fictional prose of moderate length"that is suggested by many critics, is both possible and useful.45 This catalogue, however, is "to be understood in the sense of Wittgensteinꞌs concept offamily resemblences (Familienähnlichkeiten)", as Müller stresses.

DOROTHEA FLOTHOW&MARKUSOPPOLZERxvi

In his contribution "Refashioning Fable through the Baconian Essay",Christopher Crosbie provides a detailed study of Sir Francis Bacon's Desapientia veterum, or The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609), a still unduly ne-glected collection of essays. Crosbie reads De sapientia veterum as character-istic of Bacon's philosophical project that "breaks from convention and yet,nonetheless, retains connection to an ancient, but previously lost, precedent forfree inquiry". In its "ancient newness", Crosbie argues, the essay genre offeredBacon the perfect vehicle for this project.Next, Holger Klein continues the examination of the essay in the early

modern period in his "Diverse Strains in the Early English Familiar Essay".After providing a well-informed definition of the essay in this period, Kleinconcentrates on three seventeenth-century essayists neglected by previousmodern scholarship: Henry Peacham the Younger, Abraham Cowley and SirWilliam Temple. Analysing their work, Klein offers not only an appreciation oftheir oeuvre, but also demonstrates the "genre's scope and development betweenBacon and Richard Steele and Joseph Addison". He shows how the essays ofthis period were characterised by a pronounced didacticism, which Klein sees asthe "period's hallmark" and which "derives from Bacon rather than fromMontaigne".Glyn Pursglove reintroduces the "unduly neglected" essayist James Howell,

who was yet enthusiastically praised by William Thackeray. Concentrating onHowell's work as an example, Pursglove compares and contrasts the essay genrewith other, related modes – in particular the letter or the epistle – , which asHowell's essays demonstrate, were central to the evolution of the essay.Pursglove argues that the influence of the letter, in particular the 'imaginaryepistle' with its "particular intimacy of address" was crucial in aiding thetransition from the essay in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to "theperiodical essay of the eighteenth century" and "the 'familiar' essay of thenineteenth century" and stresses Howell's importance in this development.Sarah Herbe equally draws attention to the wide scope of functions of the

essay in the early modern period. In her article "Dryden's Prefatory Essays", shediscusses some of John Dryden's prefaces to his poetic and dramatic works,which, though they have in many cases not been designated as essays by theirauthor, were read as such. While seemingly pronouncing general rules onpoetics, Dryden, as Herbe shows, in fact used his prefaces to defend hisindividual works against criticism. Therefore, it is only when appreciating theirprefatory status that we do justice to his essayistic texts, for "it is an inherentfeature which centrally shapes the structure, rhetoric and intention of Dryden'sessays", as Herbe emphasises.In "Early Modern Essays: The Harmonics of the Discourse of Authority", an

interdisciplinary paper, Maria-Ana Tupan examines the contribution of the essayto "modernity's agenda of political and epistemological pluralism". She argues

INTRODUCTION xvii

that "[t]he essay was early modernity's most efficient instrument of breakingdown idols, because it was sensitive to new ideas which were cropping up in alldisciplinary fields and emerging as their experimental ground". The new genre"was articulated as search and interrogation", vibrating at harmonics of thefundamental speech codes and subverting the "Great Face of Authority"inherited from the Middle Ages.In "Mr. Spectator's Ambiguous Authority", the first contribution to Section II

("Case Studies: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century"), Bálint Gárdosprovides a new reading of some old classics of the essay genre: Joseph Addisonand Richard Steele's The Spectator. After having been almost universallypraised for centuries, as "proponent[s] of polite conversation in a rational publicsphere", these texts have recently received a re-assessment. Reading themagainst Foucault's concepts of regimes of surveillance, they are now criticisedfor their didactic and authoritative nature. Gárdos "offers a brief sketch of thehistory of the dissenting opinions, as well as an interpretation of how theSpectator enables such radically divergent readings", concentrating in particularon the ambiguous position of the speaker. He argues that the dissenting readingsare the result of Addison and Steele's attempts of "transferring an essentiallyprivate code into the public sphere", i.e. of applying the chatty style of the coffeehouse to discuss questions of manners and correct behaviour for an audienceunknown to the writers.In "'Materials of Thinking' – The Essay as a Medium in the Debate on

Travel", Ingrid Kuczynski looks at William Godwin's uses of the essay as "ameans of pursuing cognition in an open and democratic exchange of opinion".The essay shared this aim of aquiring knowledge with the activity of travel "thatserved the community by providing an increase of useful knowledge and experi-ence, on a social as well as on an individual scale." Analysing the discourse oftravel in essays by different authors (Bacon, Godwin, Hazlitt), Kuczynski chartsthe development from didactic uses of the essay prevalent in the early modernperiod, to the searching mode employed by Hazlitt, for whose leisurely way oftravel the "seemingly rambling form" of his essays seemed particularly suitable.David Foster contrasts the two essayists and philosophers John Stuart Mill

and Thomas Carlyle in "Mill versus Carlyle: The Rise of Materialism and theDefeat of the Romantic Ideal". He reads their different uses of the essay, inparticular their very different uses of style, as representative of their verydifferent world views and politics.In "'Ancient, Hardy, Pugnacious, and Poor': Margaret Oliphant's Form and

Conformation in 'Scottish National Character' and Kirsteen", Anne Fertigcompares and contrasts an essay and a novel by the nineteenth-century Scottishwriter Oliphant. Using the examples of nation and gender, Fertig examines how"thematic ideas communicate across time and genre". Central to Fertig's essayare also the liberating potential and the potentially political functions of the

DOROTHEA FLOTHOW&MARKUSOPPOLZERxviii

essay, for, as she states, the example of Oliphant's writings "forces us to re-examine how we consider alternative forms of essay writing by marginalizedgroups". Fertig thus tackles a question repeatedly raised by many of thefollowing contributions.In his second paper, "George Orwell's Essayistic Prose", Wolfgang G. Müller

reads Orwell as a profoundly moral and political essay writer. At the same time,he argues that Orwell's style and content cannot be separated, for "[i]t is anessential feature of Orwell's essay-writing that the insistence and uncompro-mising nature of his analysis and argument as well as his clear and direct styleare interdependent." Departing from narrow, normative approaches towards theessay genre, Müller reads Orwell's "essayistic writing" in terms of an importantinnovation of the genre in the twentieth century.The German philosopher Theodor Adorno's use of the essay as a "form to

create a momentum for his critical discourse against the idea of monolithicthought systems" is the topic of Mehmet Büyüktuncay's "The Essay as a Formof Radical Critique". Showing how Adorno adapted the essay to fit hisphilosophical project, Büyüktuncay argues that for this author "the essay, in itsradical attitude towards the world, intrinsically bears a negative utopian momentfeaturing non-identity". Thus, like many of the contributions in this volume, hisarticle attests to the great potential of the essay genre for political, social andphilosophical purposes.On the basis of Susan Sontag's celebrated essays, Gulshan R. Taneja, too,

defends the genre in his paper "Sontag: Essayist". Sontag, like many otheressayists, preferred to be noted for her novels rather than her essays. Tanejareads this as a sign of the essay's current inferior status, and through a detailedanalysis, he uses Sontag's contributions to the genre to reappraise the genre as awhole. As Taneja writes:

The shape and form of the essay as practised by Gore Vidal, Normal Mailer, or TrumanCapote, and of course Susan Sontag, in their uniquely profound engagement with thesocio-political realities of our times, hardly corresponds to definitions of the essay as apoor cousin of the novel, or even of poetry.

He maintains how both Lucaks and Adorno, commonly held up as the twentieth-century champions of the essay, in fact, insistently deny that the essay couldhave an independent generic identity of its own. He therefore argues that further"major critical effort at definition" is necessary and believes that the way todefining the essay lies in acknowledging its inherent creativity.

Section III: "Case Studies of the Political Essay: Feminist and Eco-criticalAgendas": Delving back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ingridvon Rosenberg examines the essay as a form well suited for the protofeministdiscourses of the time. She analyses how women writers "discovered the essay

INTRODUCTION xix

as a text form, through which they could give voice to their dissatisfaction withwomen's social position and suggest ways for improvement". Von Rosenbergpays particular "attention to the ways in which the authoresses picked up essay-istic strategies which had proved or were proving successful to prominent malewriters". She argues that for the feminist project, the essay, as a genre that wasread by both women and men (unlike the novel), was particularly useful at atime when women still had no political power.The great potential of the essay as a genre that gives voice to women is also

stressed in Nóra Séllei's contribution "Power and Female Subjectivity inVirginia Woolf's Three Guineas". Séllei provides a reading of Woolf's famousessay, "in which the pacifist position is coupled with a wide-ranging feministcritique of patriarchy". She analyses how "the power and gender implications of[Woolf's] speaking subject" function in the text, how in particular "multipleperspectivism and irony" rooted in the subject position of the speaker of theessay as a corresponding woman are used to articulate "the speaking position of'the daughters of educated men'". Emphasising the importance of Woolf's essay,Séllei sees it as an important forerunner of third-wave feminism.The importance of the essay as a genre for enquiry and learning is noted

further in Danica Malekova's "Eco-morality Narratives in Atwood's Essays".From the perspective of cognitive semantics, this article highlights the"privileged position" of the essay, on the basis of an examination of some ofMargaret Atwood's essays, in which she advocates "what might be called eco-morality". Malekova concludes that due to its generic subjectivity, the essay hasthe unique "capacity to sever the entrenched mappings from the schemasthrough which we make sense of the world".Katarina Labudova continues the subject of Margaret Atwood's eco-critical

essays. Tracing the development of Atwood's attitudes towards environmentalissues, she highlights by which means Atwood imagines that a survival of thehuman race is possible. At the same time, she inquires into Atwood's usage ofthe essay genre, stressing in particular the hybrid creativity of Atwood's texts.Suhasini Vincent emphasises the great potential of the essay in postcolonial

discourse, "capable of justifying deeds and misdeeds, abstraction and reason andauthority and dissent". In "The Call for Political Transparency and EcocriticalActivism in Arundhati Roy's Political Essays", she explains how Arundhati Royhas used the genre to challenge "the status quo of power politics" and to "call formore political transparency and straightforwardness from politicians". Concen-trating in particular on Roy's eco-critical concerns, Vincent stresses the uniqueposition of the essay "as a form of non-violent dissent".Examining the essays of four British women writers better known for their

novels and short stories – A. S. Byatt, Zadie Smith, Marina Warner and JeanetteWinterson – , Milada Franková also highlights the flexibility and adaptability ofthe essay as a genre. Comparing and contrasting these writers' essays with their

DOROTHEA FLOTHOW&MARKUSOPPOLZERxx

fictional works, Franková asks what unique possibilities are offered by theessay, as opposed to other, fictional genres. Franková concludes that though thefour novelists show great diversity in their embrace of the essay, they all use itto comment on topics of creativity and culture. It is here, Franková suggests, thatthe essay reveals its particular potential in the twenty-first century.

The final section of this collection is dedicated to "The Essay in SpecificCultural Contexts". In "Essay Writing in Islamic Cultures", Parvin Loloi callsour attention to Islamic traditions of short prose writings which flourished fromthe seventh and eighth centuries onwards and which were very similar to theessay. Tracing the traditions of the risāla and maqāla, she suggests that furtherwork on the influence of these forms is necessary and may aid our under-standing of the essay.A very different tradition of the essay is examined in "The Contemporary

Finnish Essay and the Question of Genre" by Veli-Matti Pynttäri. Pynttäri usesRhetorical Genre Theory as proposed by Carolyn R. Miller, which defines genre"based on the action it is used to accomplish and not on the substance or form ofthe discourse", to offer new insights on the essay. Pynttäri argues that the currentproliferation of the essay in Finland is a result of recent social and publishingtrends and that the essay in general is a reaction to a world that is increasinglyfelt to be problematic. He concludes that the genre "is an indispensable tool incomprehending the shifts in social reality and in making sense of the world".Finally, Rima Bertašavičiūtė introduces us to the current essay scene in Lithu-

ania, where, after the country regained independence in 1990, the essay began toflourish. Bertašavičiūtė tackles the difficult task of defining the essay onceagain, this time in relation to its publishing medium and the literary field intowhich it emerges. On the basis of examples from Lithuanian texts,Bertašavičiūtė stresses the unique position of the Lithuanian essay in shaping the"historical and cultural memory" of a given country.

The volume as it stands can offer only selective spotlights on the long history ofthe essay – a selectivity which is to be expected in any study of this prolificgenre. However, next to chapters on neglected classics, the volume offers inparticular a sizable selection of contributions on very recent writers anddevelopments in a variety of national literatures that are rarely coveredelsewhere. Thus, the current collection attests to the long, but even more so tothe contemporary and lively, tradition of the essay, which has a few surprises instore for those who consider the form to be old-fashioned or even dead.The political and transformative potential of the essay, as the various articles

clearly show, has been embraced by women writers, activists, revolutionarythinkers and marginalised groups to give voice to their ideas and concerns. Dueto its notorious malleability, the essay has indeed repeatedly been a central

INTRODUCTION xxi

medium in bringing to the fore new structures of feeling and emerging intellec-tual trends. Its relative neglect in academic circles is therefore all the moresurprising.

Acknowledgements

We should like to take the opportunity to thank all those who have workedbehind the scenes to help us with the two conferences (2012 and 2014) as wellas with this volume: Gabriele Scheffenacker, Tanja Deinhammer, IrmgardDelpos, Elisabeth Skokan and Ute Brandhuber-Schmelzinger were indispensiblein organising the conferences. Elisabeth Schmidjell helped us with theformatting of the manuscript.The publication of the volume would not have been possible without the

support of the Department of English and American Studies (University ofSalzburg), the Rector of the University of Salzburg, the Stiftungs- undFörderungsgesellschaft of the Paris-Lodron-University, Salzburg, as well as theSparkasse Salzburg.

Salzburg, October 2016 Dorothea Flothow and Markus Oppolzer

The Origins of the Essay and Early Developments

An Elusive Genre?: An Attempt to Define the Essay

WOLFGANGG.MÜLLER

The Problem

The present article deals with the notoriously difficult problem of how to definethe essay. It is, in a way, the Mona Lisa of literary genres and theorists havefrequently felt frustrated about ever finding an adequate solution to the problemof its definition. One critic calls it "a cuckoo's egg",1 another one speaks of "anexasperatingly hybrid and amorphous literary form".2 Referring to the essay'sresistance to being pinned down, another critic even uses the metaphor of a"greased pig".3 How difficult it is to come to grips with the essay from a genericpoint of view is shown in the following quotation, which refers to the essay notas a genre but as as a polymorphic form, entirely elusive, constantly 'in between'and charged with tension:

The essay is unique as a literary form. Like Roland Barthes, I do not think it a genre(rather, he said, it is a-generic), nor do I consider it quite literature. It is "almostliterature" and "almost philosophy", a little of both, although not quite either – not athoroughgoing thing. More: the essay hangs between – between literature andphilosophy, creation and fact, fiction and nonfiction, process and product – born oftension, then, and with tension as perhaps its essential characteristic.4

It must be said, however, that critics have frequently made things more difficultthan they are and unnecessarily put obstacles in their way. One false track wouldbe the consequence of a naïve nominalism, which assumes that a text which isgiven the name of an essay necessarily belongs to the genre of the essay, whichmay, as it is well known, not be the case. Thus Locke's Essay Concerning

1 Ludwig Röhner, Der deutsche Essay: Materialien zur Geschichte und Ästhetik einerliterarischen Gattung (Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1966), p. 112.

2 Richard M. Chadbourne, "A Puzzling Literary Genre: Comparative Views on the Essay",Comparative Literature Studies 20:2 (1983), pp. 133-53, p. 133. G. Stanitzek finds theessential generic characteristic of the essay in its deviation from any norm. (cf. GeorgStanitzek, "Abweichung als Norm? Über Klassiker der Essayistik und Klassiker im Essay",Wilhelm Vosskamp, ed., Klassik im Vergleich. Normativität und Historizität europäischerKlassiken [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993], pp. 594-615).

3 Edward Hoagland, "What I Think, What I Am", Lydia Fakundiny, ed., The Art of theEssay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), pp. 690-2, p. 691.

4 G. Douglas Atkins, Reading Essays: An Invitation (Athens, GA, and London: U of GeorgiaP, 2008), p. xii.