Essayists on the Essay

The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied source book for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologised or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay. From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed head notes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologised selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to everyone who cares about the form.