The Cambridge Companion to the Essay

EDITED BY KARA WITTMAN EVAN KINDLEY

final cover coming soon

UK publication October 2022 US publication October 2022

324 pages Paperback

c. £18.99 / c. $29.99 USD / c. $34.99 CAD

At a glance

• Introduces the theory and history of the essay in accessible terms and with wide-ranging examples from various global perspectives and in different aesthetic mediums: written, photographic, filmic, and digital • Treats the essay as an international and multilingual cultural form with a significant impact on the history of aesthetics, literary theory, philosophy, political theory, anthropology, and cinema • Examines the historical, political, social, and philosophical contexts from which different forms and modes of the essay emerged and offers extensive and diverse examples

The Cambridge Companion to the Essay

Edited by Kara Wittman and Even Kindley

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? What kinds of work has the essay done in the world? This Cambridge Companion considers the history, theory, and aesthetics of the essay form from its inception in the late sixteenth century to the present. Over the course of seventeen chapters by a diverse and distinguished group of scholars, the essay is situated in the light of natural science, philosophy, critical theory, postcolonial and decolonial thinking, the history of the Black Atlantic, abolition, and racial blackness, queer theory, and the history of literary criticism, among other provocative contexts. The essay is studied alongside fiction and poetry and in its photographic, cinematic, and digital forms, with a special emphasis on how the essay is being reshaped and reimagined in the twenty-first century.

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.

Contributors

Jeff Dolven, Merve Emre, Frances Ferguson, Daegan Miller, Kara Wittman, Julianne Werlin, Anahid Nersessian, Jesse McCarthy, Ignacio M. Sánchez-Prado, David Russell, Saikat Majumdar, Grace Lavery, Jason Childs, Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, Kevin Adonis Browne, Nora M. Alter, Jane Hu