The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay. From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form. This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.

A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag. Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Brian Dillon’s style incorporates diverse features of the essay. By turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.

George Orwell is acclaimed as one of English literature's great essayists. Yet, while many are considered classics, as a body of work his essays have been neglected. Peter Marks provides the first sustained study of Orwell the essayist, giving these compelling pieces the critical attention they merit. Orwell employed the essay as a tool to entertain, illuminate and provoke readers across an array of topics. Marks situates the essays in their original contexts, exploring how journals influenced the type of essay Orwell wrote. Acknowledging this periodical culture helps explain the tactics Orwell employed, the topics he chose and the audiences he addressed. Orwell's first and last published works were essays, providing evidence of the development of his cultural and political views over two decades. Essays helped him fashion his distinctive literary 'voice' and Mark traces how their afterlife contributes to Orwell's posthumous reputation. Arguing the essays are central to Orwell's enduring literary, political and cultural value, Marks shows how we understand the complexities, subtleties, and contradictions of Orwell better when we understand his essays.

This essayists-in-depth reader isalsoa thematic reader. It arranges 55 essays by 10 of the most widely read and highly regarded writers in the English language today (including Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, E. B. White, and George Orwell) under 10 classic and provocative themes.