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13 results

The Cambridge History of the American Essay
  • Edited by Christy Wampole, Jason Childs
  • Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023
  • From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

  • 10 - Social Justice and the American Essay

  • from Part II - Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945)
  • Edited by Christy Wampole, Princeton University, New Jersey, Jason Childs
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the American Essay
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023, pp 166-181

  • Summary

    This chapter begins with the origins of "social justice," a term that emerged among Jesuits in the 1840s and ’50s and then infused the Catholic workers’ movements and social teaching of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American essayists and activists have used the essay to persuade readers of the productive overlap of two utopian systems: Christianity and (democratic) socialism. This chapter explores five thinkers – Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and Cornel West – who have been particularly prolific essayists, writing fluently and frequently about social justice in the earliest sense of the word. By recalling the earliest context of the term social justice, this chapter adds another dimension to contemporary debates on everything from Black struggle to economic inequality, from climate justice to equitable representation at all levels of government. The essay form allowed the writers studied in this chapter to articulate in a variety of styles, from the lyrical to the vociferous, the pedagogical to the morally urgent, the need for a compassionate understanding of human wretchedness in an industrialized world bent on breaking the worker.