This chapter traces the development of the essay in the context of a world of early eighteenth-century sociability constituted by coffee shops, periodicals, and a variety of informal clubs and societies. Never simply a reflection of a prior social reality, the periodical essay developed as part of a self-consciously created mythos of ‘polite literature’ designed to regulate manners in the inchoate and often contentious social world from which it represented itself as emerging. In the skilful hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, among others, the polite essay shaped values of agreeableness, conversability, and formal equality that helped define a remarkably durable idea of polite literary culture still in play – if increasingly represented as passing away – for essayists like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt writing a century later.

Based on Political Essay on the Island of Cuba by Alexander von Humboldt, this chapter scrutinizes the interactive impact of his ideas about Cuba with those of the island’s criollo intellectual elite, in particular Francisco de Arango y Parreño and José de la Luz y Caballero, also noting the assessment of those collaborations by Vidal Morales y Morales and, in the twentieth century’s first half, by Fernando Ortiz. Central to the analysis is how these writers drew on Humboldt’s antislavery and scientific legacies, while silencing the essay’s predictive advocacy for an African confederation in the future free states of the Antilles. The chapter elucidates an abolitionist turn in Arango’s writing and the role of Luz’s extensive journeys to meet with such international figures as Humboldt for modernizing scientific research and education in Cuba. While noting a canonizing halo later surrounding Humboldt’s role in Cuba, the chapter reinforces his indispensability to imaginings of an antislavery, scientific, and even independentist Cuba.

This chapter addresses the bountiful field of nineteenth-century Cuban poets, highlighting their transatlantic interactions with global Romanticism in creating a corpus of self-consciously “Cuban” literature that forged many of the foundational themes in Cuban political culture and rhetoric, including exile and an “amorous cathexis” to the island, all against the backdrop of racialized slavery and colonialism. Focusing on work by José María Heredia, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), José Jacinto Milanés, Juan Francisco Manzano, Juan Clemente Zenea, and Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, and noting the embrace by Cuban poets of European poetry and lyric conventions, the chapter underscores in Cuban Romanticism the cultural role of the local tertulias of Domingo del Monte and Nicolás Azcárate; the vernacular contexts permeated by slavery and decrying its atrocities; the drive to alter Cuba’s colonial status; early reactions to European extractivism of New World resources; and racial and gender hierarchies, further complicated by the writing and reception of poetry by people of color and by women.

This chapter examines the elaborate poetics set forth by Cuban poets on and off the island in the first three decades after the Cuban Revolution. Using the concept of “dramas of institutionalization,” the chapter traces the (sometimes extremely) divergent esthetic attitudes and geographical and political positioning by poets such as Roberto Fernández Retamar, Heberto Padilla, Eliana Rivero, Jesús Cos Causse, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Soleida Ríos, Lourdes Gil, Reina María Rodríguez, Angel Escobar, Ramón Fernández-Larrea, and Rolando Prats, among others. The accounts and analyses of Cuba’s voluminous poetic production elucidate its uses of colloquialism, interdisciplinarity, and linguistic confluence, among many other strategies.

Because of rising literacy rates and improved printing technology, the short periodical essay gained in prominence and ubiquity in Britain between 1870 and 1920. Essayists such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Max Beerbohm, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc presided over the essay’s shift away from its long, mid-Victorian magisterial form to something more entertaining, modest, immediate, and apparently trivial. However, this shorter essay accomplished serious thought by way of its lightness, and was uniquely suited to twentieth-century urban modernity, as each of these authors show in their most anthologised essays. While this short, entertaining form of the essay was most prominent, the essay thrived in an unprecedented number of contexts and forms during this period. Oscar Wilde demonstrates the essay’s range in his immediate, paradoxical, irreverent, and serious letter from prison, ‘De Profundis’, and in doing so, hints at the future of the essay.

Framing Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Antes que anochezca [Before Night Falls] as “the best-known Cuban book to have never been published in Cuba,” this chapter explores the relationship to imagination, literary history, desire, pleasure, and death that pervades its author’s entire oeuvre. With readings, along with the memoir, of the fictions Celestino antes del alba (1967), El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas (1982), Viaje a La Habana: Novela en tres viajes (1990), La loma del Ángel (1987), and El color del verano o nuevo jardín de las delicias (1991) and with allusions to other works, the chapter sees Arenas’s work as successive acts of revenge against all conformity and against all that sought to constrain imaginative freedom. This underscores his importance for individuals and communities composed of queer, dissident, and marginalized individuals in Cuba and worldwide.

This chapter examines the work of Alejo Carpentier, who achieved canonical status linked to the 1960s Latin American Boom but whose body of work registers distinct literary-cultural moments of Cuba’s and Latin America’s almost entire twentieth century and who, unlike many other Cuban writers of his generation, navigated postrevolutionary cultural politics such that he continued to be viewed as a “revolutionary” writer. Drawing on persistent questions about the legitimacy of Carpentier’s claims to Cubanness (he was a childhood immigrant whose first language was French), the chapter suggests that the writer’s prevarications regarding his origins tell us something about notions of belonging and membership in Cuba in the republican and revolutionary periods. The chapter organizes its concise overview of Carpentier’s entire oeuvre into successive periods of Carpentier’s “becoming” – first a Cuban, then a Latin American writer, and then a writer of the revolution.

This chapter investigates the tensions between the so-called cosmopolitan and national realms in works of several writers who departed the island at various points after Cuba’s 1959 revolution, spending much of their subsequent lives in the diaspora in Mexico, Spain, Paris, or the US. Some of these writers had impactful careers in Cuban publications and institutions prior to their departure. Through close readings of the fiction of Nivaria Tejera, Julieta Campos, Severo Sarduy, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Jesús Díaz, and Eliseo Alberto, the chapter unpacks the heterogenous travelers’ gazes and experiences that frame Cuban history, literature, and identity at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

This chapter examines Cuba’s most renowned nineteenth-century writer, José Martí, also known as the precursory founding figure of the transformative poetic movement Spanish American modernismo and an essayist, fiction writer, playwright, orator, political activist, and national hero. Connecting sequential key moments of Martí’s personal, intellectual, and political biography with his writing, ideas, and emergent social and political consciousness, the chapter considers Martí as a hemispheric figure whose work intertwines Cuba, Latin America, and the US. The chapter focuses particularly on Martí’s extensive body of journalistic crónicas, the majority of which were written outside Cuba, demonstrating his adept use of the genre’s stylistic and thematic malleability for multiple social and political effects and in the creation of his social philosophy and a hemispheric imaginary.

This chapter probes the relative absence in late nineteenth to early twentieth-century India of the style of essay that predominated in Britain and the United States from the seventeenth century. Rather than the heterogeneous, speculative, provisional, unmethodical, Montaignian essay, the essay that appeared in India at this time was more structured, more critical, and leaned more heavily into history. This chapter argues that the shape the essay took in India was the outcome of three factors: the condescension of colonial thinkers such as James Mill, who dismissed Indians as outside reason; the Victorian form of the essay that was transplanted to the subcontinent; and an indigenised version that transformed the essay into a vehicle for the writing of histories that was sweeping the subcontinent and was a cornerstone of the nationalist, anti-colonial struggle.

In the context of rapid modernization, urban growth, and immigration, this chapter examines the fiction of Carlos Montenegro, Lino Novás Calvo (both working-class Spanish immigrants), and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta (a feminist from a bourgeois background). The analysis elucidates the emergence from the 1920s to 1940s of new urban characters whose stories were brought into Cuban literature by these writers, and these characters’ complex enactment of the intertwining of class, gender orientation, sexuality, and race. The chapter’s comparative analyses of work by writers who all enjoyed promotion by or association with the avant-gardist Minorista group or the Revista de Avance encompass Montenegro’s prison narratives, told through the perspective not of intellectual political prisoners but of working-class inmates who have committed crimes, and exploring complex hierarchies shaping interracial homoerotic love; Novás Calvo’s stylistically inventive narratives of the fluidity of race and class intersections in settings of exploitative heavy labor; and Rodríguez Acosta’s fictional renditions of middle-class women resisting norms of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and heteronormativity.

This chapter illuminates the diverse, emergent views of reading, writing, and the literary that unfolded in Cuban journalism, a key player in nineteenth-century print culture. Drawing on both ephemeral and longer-lived newspapers and magazines, the chapter unpacks questions of normative practices, cultural tastes, linguistic correction, and the tensions among the informational, didactic, and entertainment functions of the printed word and with the literary-artistic value implicit in the notions of the “highbrow,” all of which were raised by the democratization of print culture’s outreach to anybody who could read or find someone to read to them. An analysis of the shifting meanings of the words periodismo [journalism] and lo literario [the literary] anchors these questions, in a chapter that also contextualizes journalism’s rise within pressing social issues and questions about access to literary culture by focusing further on journalism’s role as a forum for writing by free men and women of color, by a few enslaved individuals, and by white women.

This chapter introduces the concept of the proposed new geological epoch, and the main paradoxes and dilemmas that follow. The Anthropocene requires us simultaneously to see human beings as occupying a position of unprecedented responsibility for the ecosphere, and as a tragically blundering species, caught by the unforeseen consequences of previous actions. Further uncertainties derive from the current interim state in which urgent warnings coexist with stubborn normality. Ecological threats such as global warming and the extinction crisis defy representation because, in the words of Timothy Clark, they present us with ‘derangements of scale’, displacing the timescape of conventional narrative and challenging our habitual sense of what is trivial and what is important. Through close readings of essayists Kathleen Jamie, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Richard Smyth, Rebecca Tamás, and Jean Sprackland, the chapter examines the implications of these ideas for the form, style, and content of the contemporary environmental essay.

While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

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.

This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.