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.

The tradition of philosophical essayism beginning with Montaigne takes experience as its starting point, adopting a sceptical attitude towards grand philosophical systems and a priori truth. It was the favoured form of British empiricists, who looked to experience as the source of philosophical truth, and early analytic philosophers, who saw themselves as inheritors of the empiricist tradition and sought to avoid the perceived philosophical and rhetorical excesses of ‘continental’ idealism. Their adoption of the essay was accompanied by a view of writing, continued in present-day analytic philosophy, that stresses clarity, economy, and simplicity – virtues borrowed from the realm of mathematics and logic. But a tension, evident in Bertrand Russell’s work, emerges between fidelity to experience and fidelity to a mathematical model of clarity. This chapter argues that the notion of experience grounding the essay loses its philosophical richness in the analytic project.

This chapter shows the essay’s troubled evolution as an academic genre in the nineteenth century, from the norms of classical rhetoric taught in English schools to the professionalising educational practices of Scottish universities and their American counterparts. Aimed to introduce meritocracy to Oxford and Cambridge’s class preferment system, the rise of essay-based public examinations in the 1850s reshaped the academic essay to sustain an informational mastery of the complexities of British imperial rule. Professors of English reacted to the new public-exam essay regime with one of two tactics. One was to strip the essay down to a managerial model that came to be known as the five-paragraph essay, shorn of classical figurality and stressing correct usage. Meanwhile, advocates of liberal education revived the teaching of the literary essay based on Victorian models, setting up a lengthy dispute in the twentieth century between literary and social-scientific protocols of essay writing.

This chapter explores some understudied affinities between the essay and psychoanalysis as practices of living and writing. Pointing to a shared commitment to living a more ‘real’, or more vivid life, and the developmental task of coming to face reality for oneself, the chapter focuses on the way the ‘middle group’ of psychoanalysts in twentieth-century Britain – which included D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan – drew on the resources of the essay form, and the literary culture of Romanticism, in order to develop a particularly essayistic mode of psychoanalytic writing and practice. The chapter makes the case that the essay is particularly suited to exploring just what is distinctive about psychoanalytic therapeutic experience. It concludes with a more extended study of the career of Milner in the context of the development of the British welfare state, as she transitioned from essay writing to clinical practice.

This chapter addresses Cuban performance art of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In spite of the apparent ephemerality of performance, the body of work explored in this chapter is among the Cuban art most well known worldwide, sometimes for such unfortunate reasons as a controversial death (Ana Mendieta), detainment/house arrest (Tania Bruguera), or imprisonment (Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara). The chapter approaches performance art through four overlapping themes – play, betweenness, memory, and voice – to explore the ways in which individuals use an art form that unites physical body and message to intervene in varied sociopolitical and cultural fields. Other artists whose work the chapter considers include, among others, Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Yali Romagoza, Coco Fusco, Alicia Rodríguez Alvisa, Leandro Soto, and Carlos Martiel, and the collectives ARTECALLE, Los Carpinteros, and Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP), among others.