The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay

Provides a comprehensive overview of the essay, with a focus on current debates about the form The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay distinguishes itself by the wide range and scope of its themes, voices and approaches. Thirty-five leading essayists, literary critics and writing instructors explore the essay from multiple perspectives, including its theories, forms and histories as well as its cultural, political and pedagogical contexts. In particular, the volume extends the theory of the essay by addressing topics such as the construction of an essayistic self and the political dimensions of essaying. It further explores the relationship between the essay and other forms, such as philosophical writing, the column, science writing, the novel, the lyric and the advert as well as the essay in digital spaces. The book includes interviews with eight renowned contemporary writers (Robert Atwan, Brian Dillon, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Leslie Jamison, Jamaica Kincaid, Claudia Rankine, David Shields and Rebecca Solnit) who offer insights into their own essays as well as their views on the contemporary essay. The Editors Mario Aquilina is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches and researches the essay, literary theory, Shakespeare and modernist literature. He has edited The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021) and authored The Event of Style in Literature (2014). Bob Cowser Jr is Professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. He is the author of three nonfiction books, most recently Green Fields, Crime Punishment and a Boyhood Between (2010) and is also the editor of Why We're Here: Essayists on Living Upstate (2010). Nicole B. Wallack is the Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program and Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. She is the author of Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies (2017).