The Cambridge Companion to The Essay

The Cambridge Companion to the Essay considers the history, theory, and aesthetics of the essay from the moment it’s named in the late sixteenth century to the present. What is an essay? What can the essay do or think or reveal or know that other literary forms cannot? What makes a piece of writing essayistic? How can essays bring about change? Over the course of seventeen chapters by a diverse group of scholars, The Companion reads the essay in relation to poetry, fiction, natural science, philosophy, critical theory, postcolonial and decolonial thinking, studies in race and gender, queer theory, and the history of literary criticism. This book studies the essay in its written, photographic, cinematic, and digital forms, with a special emphasis on how the essay is being reshaped and reimagined in the twenty-first century, making it a crucial resource for scholars, students, and essayists.

Author Biography

Kara Wittman is Assistant Professor of English and Director of College Writing at Pomona College, where she also directs the Center for Speaking, Writing, and the Image. In addition to her work on the essay, she’s published on wonder, originality, clarity, and small forms of communication: phatic utterances, marginalia, talking birds. Evan Kindley is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College. He is the author of Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (2017) and Questionnaire (2016) and a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.