This chapter introduces the electric guitar in Southeast Asia through its history, cultural and political significance, and signature within locally popular genres of music. For more than seventy years, the electric guitar has been a technology for aesthetic innovation and cultural exchange, inspiring new genres and intraregional scenes, and new playing techniques, instrumentation, and instrument manufacturing and trade. It has also been an agent of transformation for musicians, audiences, and even nations, attending to colliding epochs of decolonization, nation-building, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism. It has inspired youth reverie and dissent, and censorship and oppression—a maligned symbol of Western imperialism and an essential tool of expressive freedom. The electric guitar has much to tell us about what Waksman calls “a deeper shift in the cultural disposition toward sound” and noise, as Southeast Asian guitarists have broadened their tonal and timbral palettes with new possibilities in electronic signaling, amplification, and distortion. But it has an equally important role in helping us understand the residual impacts of colonization, the rise of nations and youth cultures, and Southeast Asia’s past, present, and future.

The secondary status of the electric guitar in Anglo-Caribbean popular music is explored with an emphasis on recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, and reggae as the region’s most widely globalized music. Early guitarists in Jamaican popular music, Ernest Ranglin and Lynn Taitt, are referenced, alongside analyses of the instrument in the reggae recordings of The Wailers, and the works of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh featuring other players such as Donald Kinsey in lead guitar roles. The chapter utilizes first-hand interviews with key figures and also focuses on Eddy Grant as one of the most visible Caribbean guitarists through his international pop star career spanning several decades. The twenty-first-century emergence of the Trinidad-based metal act Orange Sky, fusing rock and reggae influences, is also discussed.

Communities of guitarists have existed and evolved in parallel with the instrument’s long and varied historical development. Technological progress in the twentieth century saw two major milestones for the guitar: the invention of the electric guitar, and the birth of the internet. This chapter explores the shift of guitar-based communities to virtual spaces starting with email groups, internet forums, and chat rooms. These communities serve similar functions as real-world communities by sharing knowledge and resources as well as providing spaces for discussions and performances. Peer-to-peer file sharing regenerated an old form of guitar-specific written notation: tablature. Then along came social media, which changed the entire music industry, including online guitar communities. Many of the world’s largest and most visited websites, Facebook, YouTube, X, and Instagram, are havens for guitar communities no longer defined by geographical boundaries. This has had enormous consequences as cultural and aesthetic expressions, particularly in the form of guitar performance practices, are now freely transmitted globally and instantaneously via virtual networks.

This introduction to the Cambridge Companion to the Electric Guitar offers a concise synopsis of the dominant narrative surrounding the instrument, and establishes the ways in which the current collection seeks to expand the existing framework for considering the electric guitar’s history and cultural impact. It also discusses the provisional development of “guitar studies” as an academic field, highlighting trends in conferences, journalistic and special interest publications, and discussions surrounding music technology, the electric guitar industry, and socio-demographic issues such as gender, race, and age. While electric guitar scholarship has made significant progress, it has not fully established itself as a distinct field. Currently, there is no dedicated journal or professional organization for researchers in this area. “Guitar studies” may not yet have come to fruition, but its foundation is being laid, to which this Cambridge Companion intends to contribute.

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.