With an understanding of ‘bibliography’ in its original sense of writing about books, this chapter provides a genealogy of the British bibliographical essay, commencing with the medieval bibliophile Richard de Bury. It traces the development of that species of essay through the eighteenth century, when essays started widely appearing in broadsides, newspapers, and magazines as well as books, motivating essayists to reflect upon the material form in which they were publishing. Following the periodical essayists’ critique of commercial print culture, Romantic essayists like Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey turned their attention to old books, emphasising their tangible, material value, while at the same time upholding literature’s immaterial qualities. In the age of bibliomania, antiquarian books became an opportunity for the bibliographical essay to come into its own among an expanding audience of bibliophiles and collectors.

This epilogue chapter draws on metaphors of opera to offer a layered meditation on recurrent themes, teleologies, and tropes of identity, exceptionalism, and authenticity – stated, reworked, subverted, abandoned, and resurrected in Cuban literary culture from the end of the nineteenth century into the third decade of the twenty-first. Revisiting such figures as José Martí, Julián del Casal, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Lorenzo García Vega, Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Antonio José Ponte, among others, and noting the writing of numerous literary women and men of different postrevolutionary generations who echo, mythologize, undermine, or shift directions from these legacies, the chapter asks that readers of Cuba’s cumulative literary history attune themselves to the performative voices through which this operatic literary history unfolds.

Across centuries and continents, the Irish essay has captured impressions and insights triggered by socio-political transformations across the island, and the form’s malleability has allowed writers to puzzle out the contours of Irish identity, often highlighting its deliberate performativity. Shaped by the culture’s oral tradition, the Irish essay frequently imbricates with storytelling, theatrical performance, and public lectures, live events that underscore its performative qualities. Writers often gear their impressions and inquiries self-consciously to audiences real and imagined, assuming the essay plays a meaningful role in public dialogue. In the twenty-first century, personal and lyric essays focused on rapidly changing perceptions of bodies and sexuality exemplify this trait. This alertness to performance and audiences helps to explain the Irish essay’s ready adaptation to new forms, technologies, and platforms in pursuit of readers, listeners, and viewers at home and abroad.

This chapter examines alternative cultural projects that emerged in Cuba from the 1980s into the new millennium: intellectual groupings, periodicals, and writing initiatives neither fully in the state’s purview nor fully outside of it. The chapter elucidates the national and international factors as well as intellectual and artistic goals marking such projects as Paideia (1989–1990), Diáspora(s) (1993–c.2002), Torre de Letras (2001–2016), OMNI Zona Franca (1995–?), and la noria (2009–) and notes their impact on the writers of Generation Zero, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who published some of their work in these venues. Although the chapter includes numerous writers, key figures addressed include Rolando Prats (Paideia); Reina María Rodríguez (Paideia and Torre de Letras); Rolando Sánchez Mejías, Carlos A. Aguilera, Ricardo Alberto Pérez, Pedro Marqués de Armas, and Rogelio Saunders (Diásporas); Juan Carlos Flores, Amaury Pacheco, David Escalona, Luis Eligio Pérez, Alina Guzmán, Nilo Julián González, Damián Valdés, and Jorge (Yoyi) Pérez (OMNI Zona Franca); and Oscar Cruz and José Ramón Sánchez (la noria).

Departing from a detailed examination of a new enthusiasm for the genre of science fiction among Cuban writers in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, this chapter analyzes major trends and themes in detective fiction, speculative fiction (including its subgenre cyberpunk), and graphic novels in the pre- and post post-1989 periods, along with their relationship to other bodies of knowledge and literary production, on the island and elsewhere. Through the examination of work by writers as diverse as José Miguel Sánchez (Yoss), Daína Chaviano, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Jorge Enrique Lage, and Arturo Infante, among several others, the chapter demonstrates how these writers not only register the changing temperatures of ideology, morality, and everyday realities in ways that challenge Cuban exceptionalism, but also project dreams for a better planet, less tempered by utopian discourses of the past.

Essayists have long reflected on the reasons for travel – its educational, cultural, and spiritual advantages – often (and uncritically) championing travel for its own sake. This chapter identifies the formal aspects of essayistic British travel writing in authorial perspective, thematic content, and publication format, tracking their change over time. It shows that the discursive and stylistic development of the British travel essay was closely bound up with the diversification of the periodical press and the expansion of the empire. Ultimately, it shows that essayists developed a more self-aware and critical attitude towards travelling, informed by a sense of geopolitical, ecological, and ethical responsibility.

This chapter showcases the writing of Cuban intellectuals of the early republican years, when excitement about the achievement of independence was muted by the overbearing presence and influence of the US and concerns about Cuban identity or “character” as a moral or social problem deemed as needing correction to achieve full-fledged, autonomous citizenship. Noting the continuing influence of ideals for an educated citizenry held by nineteenth-century philosopher-educator Enrique José Varona (vice president from 1913 to 1917); the hierarchies of Cuban ethnicities and negative stereotypes of Black Cubans promulgated in Fernando Ortiz’s early work and by essayist Francisco Figueras; and the role in these cultural conversations of Cuban journalism, including Cuba Contemporánea and Social, the chapter examines shifting views of what were portrayed as strengths or weaknesses of Cuban character in essays, drama, and novels by José Antonio Ramos, Miguel de Carrión, and Carlos Loveira, with attention to Jorge Mañach as a key figure in a second republican generation.

This chapter analyzes first-hand, multifaceted accounts within poetry and literary and documentary narratives that portray the experiences of the encounters between Cuba and Angola generated by Fidel Castro’s mobilization of Cubans to Angola in the mid-1970s, the nation’s most significant international mission. In the early years of the encounter, the chapter demonstrates, this body of work highlighted historical parallels of liberation from colonialism and celebrations of Cuban sacrifices but also revealed linguistic and cultural misunderstanding and the reproduction of stereotypes of Africa and Africans. Work on the subject published in the late twentieth century and first two decades of the twenty-first, by contrast, generally manifested the war’s after-effects, highlighting isolation, miscommunication, and uncertainty.

Aside from its intellectual content, the essay provides a space for contemporary British novelists to enhance their career prospects. This takes the threefold forms of intertexual affiliation by co-publication within the same title as other writers; of creating a space in which to generate prestige-enhancing controversy; and of enabling novelists to hold academic affiliations. This chapter examines these features through a network analysis of the publications in The London Review of Books over the past two decades and then through case studies of Hilary Mantel, Will Self, Tom McCarthy, and Zadie Smith.

The early essay in English was a fluid and malleable form. It was thus ‘fugitive’: it could be deeply topical, fleeting, and perishable, taking up the ephemeral and the occasional, and could easily travel across media from reader to reader given its portability. This chapter studies how writers exploited the affordances of the essay, first in seventeenth-century newsbooks and pamphlets, and then in early eighteenth-century periodicals. It retraces the origins of the English newsbook in a highly regulated media ecology, and examines the essayistic writings of Marchamont Nedham as a case study in stylistic innovation and rhetorical self-fashioning. During the era of licensing (1662–95) and the first decades of the eighteenth century, essayists continued to adapt the form, finding in the emergent print media of this period a ready site for politics and polemic.

This chapter examines the Matanzas-based Cuban publishing house Ediciones Vigía, founded in 1985 by writer Alfredo Zaldívar Muñoa and the poet and graphic and set designer Rolando Estévez Jordán, initially as a space for artistic events and performative encounters through a network of writers, artists, artisans, musicians, students, teachers, professors, and workers. Situating the publishing enterprise and its singular book objects within Matanzas’s rich and disturbing economic development and cultural history, forged by slavery and the amassing of sugar wealth in the nineteenth century, the chapter analyzes the twentieth-century economic factors that contributed to the Vigía endeavor and provides illuminating and detailed information about its unique strategies of bricolage and convergences in its book objects, among multiple artistic forms and techniques.

This chapter examines the state-organized cultural literacy movements of postrevolutionary Cuba and the dynamics of the demands of the collective sphere, along with individuation and standing out. The chapter analyzes the model of the socialist worker-amateur citizen fostered by the revolutionary state, arguing that the figures of the amateur and the “art instructor,” as well as the creation of local casas de cultura [houses of culture], became antidotes to capitalist consumer culture. Along with their positive, diversifying effects, the chapter suggests, there came a deep suspicion toward practitioners of so-called elitist culture, demonstrating how, within this process, the state emerged as both benefactor and punisher.

How does an essay change when it appears in a newspaper, aimed at a mass reading public that includes people of varied class backgrounds? This chapter takes up how periodical publication shaped nineteenth-century essays, looking at the effects of serialisation, republication through excerpting, and the intertextual nature of Victorian journals and papers. It explores how the political journalism and social protest movements of the 1830s and 1840s influenced the essay, in contrast to the notion that political campaigning is opposed to the contemplative and reflective values associated with the genre. Focusing on Thomas Carlyle’s response to the social movements of his time, the chapter argues that not only did Carlyle engage ideologically with popular protest but that the writing he encountered in the radical press shaped his style by encouraging an oratorical mode, melodramatic language and rhetorical excesses.

This chapter examines the work of numerous creative artists in multiple media and genres, some of whom wrote works that formed part of the Cuban literary canon, but whose lives and identities were seen as problematic for the revolutionary state. Focusing particularly on figures whose intersectional identities somehow threatened hegemonic biases, the chapter elucidates the extent to which a preoccupation with sexual practices and gender identities was at the core of the Cuban revolutionary state and the homophobic legacies it inherited from the bourgeois past. The chapter teases this out by exploring critical and theoretical rereadings, in addition to numerous musical, literary, theatrical, and cinematographic works and productions from multiple postrevolutionary periods, wherein queerness emerges as central to the nation and its diaspora.

This chapter examines Cuban fiction about slavery emerging in the 1830s–1840s: Petrona y Rosalía (1838) by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel; Francisco, el ingenio o las delicias del campo (1838–1839) by Anselmo Suárez y Romero; the short story “Cecilia Valdés” (1839) by Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894), who later developed it into the novel Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1882); Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano; and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The chapter contextualizes the analysis in tensions between the demands for labor and “ad hoc moral alibis” characterizing Plantation America, particularly the improvised concepts of racial differentiation – Blackness and Black-and-white miscegenation – typifying responses to these tensions. The analysis of this literature as speculative writing that looks simultaneously toward the past and future links it to the sometimes improvisational and speculative nature of the new plantation-based societies, which were themselves entangled between speculative finance capital and moral reflections on freedom, and to the intensified anxieties about Cuba’s racialized future generated by the 1841 demographic census.