This chapter traces the history of the essay against the backdrop of changing theories of distraction in the long eighteenth century. As the population of urban centres grew, readers’ seemingly waning attention spans had to counter a barrage of auditory and visual stimuli. Everyday diversions were compounded by literary ones: falling paper costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing the periodical essay to compete with a dizzying array of prose fiction, poems, sermons, and histories. Focusing on a series of prominent eighteenth-century and Romantic essayists, particularly Samuel Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb, we argue that the essay form is powerfully shaped by its engagement with the wandering mind. Debates over distraction that began in the Enlightenment continue to shape the genre today, as modern essay forms – New York Times essays, blogs, Twitter feeds – continue to structure themselves around assumptions about short attention spans.

This chapter traces the rigorous intellectual work of philosopher-pedagogues José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela y Morales, and Enrique José Varona, demonstrating their shared anti-authoritarian pedagogy, exemplified not only in how they transformed the teaching of philosophy and science at the University of Havana, but also in their liberal and republican views of politics and their model roles as public intellectuals engaged in the righting of social ills. The analysis demonstrates that the three men’s philosophical and pedagogical arguments were modernizing and progressive for their time and might therefore appear to challenge the class and racial interests supporting the tyrannical regime imposed by Spain on the island. At the same time, the chapter complicates this view of their contributions to education and philosophy with examples of their periodic blind spots with regard to authoritarian abuses around them or their failures to speak out against such abuses.

Essays of the ‘age of catastrophe’ encompassing the two World Wars have been judged aesthetic failures because, in their argumentative force and dogmatism, they break with a fundamental commitment of the essayistic: to provide an open, even democratic relational space between reader and writer. This has hindered our ability to recognise them as important objects of historic memory. Assuming that the rhetorical power of the essay may just as often be used to defend truth and justice as to agitate for and justify violent conflict, this chapter will examine the essayistic mode of political essays by Rudyard Kipling and Vernon Lee. It will argue that political essays often display the same longing for connection and attachment that has long been deemed the cornerstone of the literary essay.

This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.

This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

The extraordinary popularity of essays amongst British readers in the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of the idea of the professional author – an historical convergence that reflects both the popularity of the genre with writers of the age and the prominence of the essay as a discursive space in which the idea of literary professionalism could be imagined. Throughout the century, essay writers repeatedly emphasised not just the spirit of polite sociability evoked by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator, but more self-ironically, the ways that their digressive and miscellaneous style and everyday focus resonated with the pressures of commercial modernity. In doing so, they articulated a version of literary professionalism that grounded its value in precisely the sorts of apparent limitations that authors were embracing as a basis of the essay genre.

This chapter unpacks the hegemonic attitudes within the extensive anticolonial project of Cuban feature-length and documentary film from 1959 to 1989. The chapter first explores the centrality in and contributions to the New Latin American cinema movement of Cuba, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), and Cuban film directors Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Santiago Álvarez. At the same time, the chapter makes visible the many accomplished though lesser-known creative agents who helped shape these directors’ model of auteur esthetics, demonstrating how films by Sara Gómez and Nicolás Guillén Landrián also constitute fundamental and critical contributions to the Cuban cinematic canon of the period, which typically privileged the contributions of white men.

This chapter on Cuba’s avant-gardes of the 1920s and early 1930s focuses on writers associated with the Grupo Minorista and the Revista de Avance, examining their cultivation of porous intellectual communities and the attention they paid to everyday expressive forms in seeking to translate Cuban orality into writing. These writers, the chapter argues, sought new ways of characterizing Cuban experience and identity, engaging critically with their surroundings and positioning themselves as consequential cultural actors. The chapter portrays the Minoristas’ approach to the tertulia as an affective assemblage that thrives on difference and artful disagreement, welcomes international visitors, and, while being capacious enough to include women, clings to gender stereotypes. It also draws connections between the group’s tertulias and the international cosmopolitan interactions forged by the conversational qualities of the Revista de Avance, with a literary and linguistic “art of eavesdropping,” stylistic self-consciousness, interstitial participant-observer positions, and hierarchical views of culture projected by such Minorista writing as the crónicas and essays of Jorge Mañach.

This chapter argues that reading music and musicians is fundamental to understanding Cuban literature and its temporality, geography, and community-formation. After tracing some of the standard ways in which critics have aimed to connect music to the literary, the chapter suggests more social approaches to what it might mean for literary or cultural studies scholars to take music in more fully as part of social life. This conception of the social, the chapter argues, is not one to which a new or revolutionary socialism aspired after Cuba’s revolution, but rather something more ancient, less prescribed, more improvisatory, and experienced with others. Attention to popular music and the worlds it forges through the chapter’s analysis of a postrevolutionary musical primer, as well as to lyrics, sounds, and even visuality, grounds the chapter’s conception of music as an entrée into epochs beyond the historical confines of a particular musical entity or event. The complete somatic experience of music’s nuance, irony, submerged histories, happenings, and temporal overlaps can enliven and expand what literary scholars might conceptualize as an individualized “close reading.”

This chapter addresses the developments in literary and intellectual culture following the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution, including the complex debates about the relationship between form and content that featured in the literature and the literary landscape of the new revolutionary society. Outlining the national and international contexts in which cultural policy was being developed and implemented, and within and against which individual and grouped actors, discourses, and texts were contributing to a heterogeneous understanding of literature in the revolution, the chapter underscores the relationship in the 1960s and 1970s among literature, cultural trends, processes of legitimization, political actions, and newly founded state institutions. In this context, the chapter then investigates how intermedial creations – and,m more specifically, the testimonio, a genre portrayed as a “radical anticolonial and decolonizing experiment” – negotiate individual agency and collective identity.

This chapter analyzes the life writing of Mercedes Merlin, who wrote about Cuba, and other topics, entirely in French, after adopting Paris as her intellectual home. The analysis teases out the singularities and paradoxes of her relatively late inclusion – a process the chapter notes in other recent scholarship – in the historical imaginary of Cuban literature. That imaginary, the chapter argues, is prone to privileging signs of emancipation and racial justice in nineteenth-century writing, whereas Merlin, even as she depicted Cuban slavery’s cruelties, did not call for its abolition. Yet, even while her work exhibits some disturbing views of Black and mixed-race people, the chapter suggests that her nuanced considerations of Black subjects intimate a glimmer of proto-abolitionism. The chapter further demonstrates and details that, for Merlin, the rhetoric of life writing provided an avenue to tell her own story and that of other rebellious lives, such that her work projects a notion of freedom, not only in its subject matter but also in its inventive mix of autobiography and fiction.

This chapter describes some of the salient characteristics of the ‘preface essay’, a form with a long history that has not received sustained critical attention. With reference to existing theories of the preface by Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida as well as important examples of the form by authors mainly in the English literary tradition, ranging from John Dryden, through William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and to Zadie Smith, this chapter provides a conceptual framework for authorial preface essays, their generic characteristics, and what they reveal about the relationship between the prefatorial and the essayistic. It will argue that the preface essay is a space of authorial self-crafting that attains durability and literary value by combining aspects of the prefatorial, such as its dependence on the work it prefaces and its occasionality, with the essayistic movement from the specific to the general, and the particular to the abstract.

A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

Using the essays of John Stuart Mill and other classical utilitarians as touchstones, this essay tracks some of the most politically charged shifts in the Victorian political essay, underscoring the significance of issues of racism and imperialism for coming to terms with the genre. The first two sections provide introductory historical background on the cultural and literary significance of the utilitarians, and detail some important ethical and political dimensions of Mill’s philosophical framework. The remaining sections analyse two singularly revealing essayistic encounters: Mill’s exchanges with Thomas Carlyle over the so-called ‘Negro’ question, and Henry Sidgwick’s assessment of the work of Charles Henry Pearson on national life and character. The striking difference between the political essaying of Mill and that of his utilitarian disciple Sidgwick on matters of imperialistic racism is indicative of some of the evasive literary tactics that have been all too influential, from their era to ours.

This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

From the outset, food and the essay have shared a kinship, given that one of the original senses of the word ‘essai’ meant the ritual of tasting the French king’s food and drink. From metaphor to content, food has permeated the essay form; in turn, the essay became the vehicle for the emerging field of gastronomy. This chapter constellates several important moments of interaction between literal and literary taste, consumption and appetite, cultural criticism and culinary knowledge in essays by Michel Montaigne, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, William Kitchiner, Launcelot Sturgeon, Charles Lamb, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. As cosmopolitan practices of discretionary dining became more widespread, these gastronomic essayistic writers often satirised the burgeoning bourgeoisie and their cultural milieu. Given its flexibility, the essay remains paramount to food writing, in its many forms and genres.