Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.

This chapter surveys the rise of New Criticism in American letters during the interwar years through the 1950s. It pays attention to the influence of two overlapping associations: the Fugitive Poets and the Nashville Agrarians. The Fugitives, a group of Vanderbilt English professors and Nashville notables, had formed in the years leading up to World War I to discuss current trends in literature and philosophy. The Agrarians, southern commentators trained in a variety of disciplines, collaborated on a symposium in the 1930s that decried the deleterious effects of industrial capitalism and promoted values that purportedly undergirded an agrarian economy. Together the two groups came to shape the tenets of New Criticism. New Critics mourned the turn away from formalist principles that had established the criteria by which one should evaluate literature. Agrarians bemoaned the demise of a set of values that ostensibly emerged from a labor system that championed family farming, property ownership, and small government. Both New Critics and Agrarians, then, engaged in reclamation projects as they sought to salvage what they believed to be all that was good and beautiful in the world.

This chapter chronologically follows the development of the American science essay from the eighteenth century, through the foundation of government, corporate, and university research institutes, and ending with contemporary criticism of research practices. Throughout history, science essayists have brought knowledge of new discoveries to the general public by writing in accessible, unexpected, and lyrical prose. They fill a gap between the specialist’s research and the public’s hunger for science news. Beyond communicating research to a mass audience, the science essay offers a space for moral reflection and debate about the implications of scientific knowledge and technological advancements. Science essayists share the common goal of situating research within both a personal perspective and a broad worldview. The science essay acknowledges humanity’s place within nature, embracing scientific insight while questioning the instrumentalism from which it springs.

This chapter takes stock of the various definitions and valuations the essay has accrued over the course of the history of American literary theory and criticism. Starting with the historical-materialist criticism of the Great Depression era and moving on to the New Criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, then delving into the myriad structuralisms and poststructuralisms of the Cold War and postcommunist eras, before concluding with contemporary critical trends, it tracks the discipline’s trajectory in the American context, all the while zeroing in on the essay’s shifting position therein. The chapter throws into relief the fundamental dialectic between hermetic formalism and committed social criticism that has shaped literary studies in the United States since its rise early in the twentieth century and teases out the way this perennial vacillation has rendered more or less appealing, and more or less useful, the essay as a form and object of analysis.

With a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter recounts the history of American nature writing in its many iterations. Like the essay in general, nature writing is a hybrid form. It is omnivorous, incorporating elements of travel writing, natural philosophy, ethnography, diarism, and epistolary writing. Nature writing of the period in question is filled with technical information on plants and animals, agricultural practices, and methods for hunting or navigating, but it also abounds with metaphysical speculations, theological pronouncements, elaborate landscape descriptions, and dramatic accounts of practices like hiking, camping, fishing, and farming. Authors of many of the most well-known essays had professional ties to disciplines like geology, botany, and forestry. Featured essayists in this chapter include St. John de Crèvecoeur, Meriwether Lewis, John Wesley Powell, John Muir, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon, among others.

This chapter delivers the rich history of the American comic essay. From its inception in the seventeenth century, sociopolitical concerns have dominated the genre. Borrowing from British sources and employing features common to humorous writing, the American comic essay customizes these for an American public using national imagery, local allusions, and distinctly American language. Earlier humorists voiced independent religious and political ideologies even before the formation of the new nation. Later, fictional personae expressed themselves in hyperbolic style and used vernacular and vulgar language, laden with irony and sarcasm, to capture the discontinuities of the industrializing nation. Articulating ethical visions of the new democracy, literary comedians like Artemus Ward expanded the naïve, deadpan voice brought to international prominence by Mark Twain. Later essayists maintained the rhetoric, persona, exaggeration, and irony that caricature American pragmatism, and further expanded the range of themes to include personal psychology, sexuality, and other once taboo topics. The chapter’s final pages feature the diverse contemporary landscape of American humor writing.

This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.

The genteel tradition, inspired by British essayists, thrived in the United States in the early twentieth century up until the 1930s. George Santayana coined the term in 1911 to describe a group of New England intellectuals who, through their essays, acted as cultural gatekeepers, defining the standards of moral behavior and the rules of good literature. This chapter traces a genealogy between European genteel essayists and their American counterparts, focusing particularly authors such as Charles S. Brooks, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Louise Imogen Guiney, Gail Hamilton, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Agnes Repplier, George William Curtis, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Charles Dudley Warner. Much of the genteel essayists’ privileged Anglo, upper-middle-class, Christian values and sought to defend "high culture" against its perceived enemies: industrialism, immigration, capitalism, and class polarization. The chapter closes with a presentation of Black genteel essayistic writing and reflects on how the genteel tradition should be understood today, as a more critical eye is turned toward writers of the past whose ideals do not align with contemporary social and political sensibilities.

Focusing on the work of Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, and Cora Diamond, this chapter shows how twentieth-century academic philosophy in the United States can be characterized in part by an ongoing interest in and exploration of the essay as a philosophical form. In a pluralist spirit, these explorations approach the essay form as a place to rethink and remodel what philosophical argumentation might look like. Related to this work of reimagining, such writing addresses the proximity of philosophy to literature in two senses. First, it is attentive to the potentially literary, written character of philosophy. Second, it is characterized by an interest in taking up works of literature philosophically, as a continuation of philosophical analysis and as a means of immanent criticism precipitating questions about philosophical analysis itself. That the essay became a salient form for these philosophers reflects their methodological radicalism. Each asks questions about philosophy as a kind of writing, and, as Rorty noted, writing tends to come to the foreground in periods of disciplinary crisis or radicalism, when the implicit “stage-setting” of a discipline comes under question.

This chapter considers the Federalist Papers, an essay collection by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay under the pseudonym Publius and advocating for the ratification of the US Constitution starting in 1787. Beginning with reflections on the origins of the word essay and its many meanings, particular attention is given to one of these: the essay as an attempt to do something, either as an action or through writing. A central question guided the ratification debate: Could there be an essay – a concerted effort – striving toward just representation? In the passionate debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, a secondary, hidden debate was simmering: In what kind of prose should arguments be articulated? Was the essay, with its notoriously loose style and method, up to the task? In its ability to accommodate multiple, sometimes contradictory viewpoints in the same textual space, was it ideal for puzzling out the nation’s future? Or was it too distracted, a form of bad thought scribbled in haste, unsuited for such a momentous task? This chapter shows the correlative features of striving toward a political ideal and the striving involved in essayistic writing.

By necessity, immigrants must think, act, and live experimentally when they arrive at their new destination. Given that the essay also possesses an experimental quality, it is unsurprising to find that in the United States – often called the land of immigration – the essayistic canon includes a vast corpus of writing by immigrants. Indeed, the dual or multiple identity of an immigrant-essayist is one of the most common in American writing. This chapter is concerned with a particular group of such immigrant-essayists: those who arrived in the United States as a result of exile from Germany. It focuses particularly on Hans Richter, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Kantorowicz, Thomas Mann, and Herbert Marcuse (as well as his student Angela Davis) who – like countless other artists, scholars, authors, directors, and other intellectuals – fled to the United States from war, persecution, and precarity in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. The final section explores the works of Christa Wolf, an author who grew up in socialist East Germany and whose visits to the United States before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain strongly influenced her essayistic writing.

This chapter’s focus is the nineteenth century, at the moment of ascendency of the popular magazine in capitalist print culture, when the essay achieved new prominence as well as a somewhat altered function as a marketable vehicle for literary criticism aimed at a popular audience. Edgar Allan Poe in particular harnessed the essay’s power to articulate a unique aesthetic philosophy and influenced generations of poet-essayists and poet-critics. While literary artists such as Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass exemplified the many writers whose innovations appeared in what one might call the philosophical, political, or ruminative essay, Poe worked assiduously to found his literary reputation not only on his poetry but on an innovative form of the magazine essay as an exercise in expert aesthetic criticism. Poe’s work as a literary critic working in and editing commercial magazines helped reshape both the popular and the critical sense of the nature and potential of literary art, especially poetry, in the modern world in ways that remain vital, if controversial, to both poets and critics today.

This chapter focuses on the canonical essays that theorized in real time the new stylistic and thematic tendencies in American postmodern fiction. Since the late 1960s, prominent practitioners of postmodernist fiction have been at the forefront of critical debates over contemporary American narrative. From the 1960s to the 1990s, brilliant authors such as Raymond Federman, John Barth, Ronald Sukenick, and David Foster Wallace engaged in essayistic reflections on the problem of innovation in American fiction, including Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” and Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Despite differences and generational distance, in some of their best essayistic writing these writers often focused on the (old) problem of “the new” in art, reframed as a discourse on the making or unmaking of the postmodernist aesthetic in response to a supposed exhaustion of literary language. They did so from a liminal position, namely from the ambivalent stance of the writer-critic, and ended up producing some of the most penetrating essays on contemporary American literature during this period, indelibly marking an era in the history of the American essay.

This chapter features the contributions of influential and lesser-known essayists who have written persuasively and engagingly on gender and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Issues of identity and difference have had a profound effect on the writing of our age, and certainly on the essay, the most elusive of genres. This chapter considers the intersections of the essay, gender, and queer studies/consciousness over the last few decades, first in a general sense, and then through the lens of specific essayists who have had the most significant impact on the direction of the essay since 1970 in the United States. Beginning with second-wave feminism, this chapter discusses the work of those essayists in feminist and LGBTQ+ communities whose foundational writing on gender still resonates today. The chapter examines important essays that emerged from third- and fourth-wave feminism and then pursues the stylistic and thematic innovations brought by lesbian, gay, trans, and queer writers who have explored topics such as gender as performance, HIV and AIDS, misogyny and misandry, intersectionality, discrimination, and the medicalization and mediatization of desire.

This chapter traces the development in the United States of the lyric essay (and, peripherally, essayistic poetry), with a focus on three contemporary writers: Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, and Maggie Nelson. Beginning with competing definitions of this hybrid genre whose contours are not always easy to discern, the chapter describes the role of American creative writing programs and the poetry classroom in the emergence of this special type of writing, which has gained ground in the early years of the twenty-first century. Examples from the lyric essays of Carson, Dillard, and Nelson are then read closely in an attempt to isolate the features unique to this genre celebrated by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall in their manifesto "New Terrain: The Lyric Essay" (1997).

The chapter shows the outsize influence of the British periodical essay tradition, represented in publications like Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711– 12), on eighteenth-century American periodical essays. The British series presented themselves as the musings of fictional personae who lived in cities. The persona (almost always male) wandered about town, reflecting on what he observed and overheard in coffeehouses, streets, theaters, and other places of business or leisure. He was often diverted and sometimes frustrated by his fellow citizens; he also strived to enlighten with casual criticism of the arts or musings on the relevance of religion and history to everyday life. A pervasive, low-level irony was common in these writings. American essayists such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, and Judith Sargent Murray borrowed from the British model, customizing it for an American readership. The most original early American essay series sketch in their personae a knowing independence of mind amid a distracted and unreflective urban crowd, a rhetorical standpoint that paradoxically would come to define a newly nationalistic body of literature in the nineteenth century.