The Essay At the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form

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In the hands of such writers as Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, David Shields, Zadie Smith and many others, the essay has re-emerged as a powerful literary form for tackling a fractious 21st-century culture. The Essay at the Limits brings together leading scholars to explore the theory, the poetics and the future of the form. The book links the formal innovations and new voices that have emerged in the 21st-century essay to the history and theory of the essay. In so doing, it surveys the essay from its origins to its relation to contemporary cultural forms, from the novel to poetry, film to music, and from political articles to intimate lyrical expressions. The book examines work by writers such as: Theodor W. Adorno, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annie Dillard, Brian Dillon, Jean Genet, William Hazlitt, Samuel Johnson, Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Ben Lerner, Audre Lorde, Oscar Wilde, Michel de Montaigne, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Wallace Stevens, Eliot Weinberger and Virginia Woolf.

Reviews

An outstanding collection of cutting-edge criticism and scholarship on a historically undervalued genre. The contributors offer fresh and diverse perspectives on traditional approaches to the essay as well as provocative new ways to reimagine the genres literary and cultural significance as we move deeper into a digital future. The essay needs and deserves more rigorous studies like this one. * Robert Atwan, Series Editor, The Best American Essays *
The Essay at the Limits, like the Roman god Janus, has a double vision: a set of eyes look back at the beginnings of the essay, its etymologies, genealogies and traditions; the other pair observe the essays relevance in the 21st century as a powerful literary form, as the blurb puts it, in a contemporary world riddled with post-truth. This double vision equips the editor and the contributors with critical foresight. * Fourth Genre *
Mario Aquilinas selection of [examined work] indicates that he has his finger on the pulse of the essay today. Yet Aquilina, like the authors contributing to this collection, also has the ability to connect contemporary zeitgeist to the history of the essay genre. * The Cambridge Quarterly *

Author Bio

Mario Aquilina is Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta. He is the author of The Event of Style in Literature (2014).