Essay

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see�Essay (disambiguation).
"Essays" redirects here. For other uses, see�Essays (disambiguation).
For a description of essays as used by Wikipedia editors, see�Wikipedia:Essays.
This article�needs additional citations for�verification.�Please help�improve this
article�by�adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed.
Find sources:�"Essay"���news���newspapers���books���scholar���JSTOR�(October
2017)�(Learn how and when to remove this message)Essays of�Michel de Montaigne
An�essay�is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own�argument,
but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a�letter, a�paper,
an�article, a�pamphlet, and a�short story. Essays have been sub-classified as
formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity,
logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the
personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential
manner), humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of
theme," etc.[1]
Essays are commonly used as�literary criticism, political�manifestos,
learned�arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of
the author. Almost all modern essays are written in�prose, but works in�verse�have
been dubbed essays (e.g.,�Alexander Pope's�An Essay on Criticism�and�An Essay on
Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like�John Locke's�An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding�and�Thomas Malthus's�An Essay on the Principle
of Population�are counterexamples.
In some countries (e.g., the United States and Canada), essays have become a major
part of formal�education.[2]�Secondary students are taught structured essay formats
to improve their writing skills;�admission essays�are often used by�universities�in
selecting applicants, and in the humanities and social sciences essays are often
used as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams.
The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other media beyond writing. A�film
essay�is a movie that often incorporates documentary filmmaking styles and focuses
more on the evolution of a theme or idea. A�photographic essay�covers a topic with
a linked series of�photographs�that may have accompanying text or�captions.
Definitions
John Locke's 1690�An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The word�essay�derives from the French infinitive�essayer, "to try" or "to
attempt". In English�essay�first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still
an alternative meaning. The Frenchman�Michel de Montaigne�(1533�1592) was the first
author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as
"attempts" to put his thoughts into writing.
Subsequently,�essay�has been defined in a variety of ways. One definition is a
"prose composition with a focused subject of discussion" or a "long, systematic
discourse".[3]�It is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall.�Aldous
Huxley, a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject.[4]�He notes that "the
essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything", and
adds that "by tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece".
Furthermore, Huxley argues that "essays belong to a literary species whose extreme
variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of
reference". These three poles (or worlds in which the essay may exist) are:
* The personal and the autobiographical: The essayists that feel most comfortable
in this pole "write fragments of reflective autobiography and look at the world
through the keyhole of anecdote and description".
* The objective, the factual, and the concrete particular: The essayists that write
from this pole "do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention
outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. Their art consists of
setting forth, passing judgment upon, and drawing general conclusions from the
relevant data".
* The abstract-universal: In this pole "we find those essayists who do their work
in the world of high abstractions", who are never personal and who seldom mention
the particular facts of experience.
Huxley adds that the most satisfying essays "...make the best not of one, not of
two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist."
History
The examples and perspective in this article�may not represent a�worldwide view�of
the subject.�You may�improve this article, discuss the issue on the�talk page,
or�create a new article, as appropriate.�(January 2011)�(Learn how and when to
remove this message)Montaigne
Montaigne's "attempts" grew out of his�commonplacing.[5]�Inspired in particular by
the works of�Plutarch, a translation of whose��uvres Morales�(Moral works) into
French had just been published by�Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his
essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled�Essais, was published in two volumes in
1580.[6]�For the rest of his life, he continued revising previously published
essays and composing new ones. A third volume was published posthumously; together,
their over 100 examples are widely regarded as the predecessor of the modern essay.
Europe
While Montaigne's philosophy was admired and copied in France, none of his most
immediate disciples tried to write essays. But Montaigne, who liked to fancy that
his family (the Eyquem line) was of English extraction, had spoken of the English
people as his "cousins", and he was early read in England, notably by�Francis
Bacon.[7]
Bacon's�essays, published in book form in 1597 (only five years after the death of
Montaigne, containing the first ten of his essays),[7]�1612, and 1625, were the
first works in English that described themselves as�essays.�Ben Jonson�first used
the word�essayist�in 1609, according to the�Oxford English Dictionary. Other
English essayists included�Sir William Cornwallis, who published essays in 1600 and
1617 that were popular at the time,[7]�Robert Burton�(1577�1641) and�Sir Thomas
Browne�(1605�1682). In Italy,�Baldassare Castiglione�wrote about courtly manners in
his essay�Il Cortigiano. In the 17th century, the Spanish�Jesuit�Baltasar
Graci�n�wrote about the theme of wisdom.[8]
In England, during the�Age of Enlightenment, essays were a favored tool of
polemicists who aimed at convincing readers of their position; they also featured
heavily in the rise of�periodical literature, as seen in the works of�Joseph
Addison,�Richard Steele�and�Samuel Johnson. Addison and Steele used the
journal�Tatler�(founded in 1709 by Steele) and its successors as storehouses of
their work, and they became the most celebrated eighteenth-century essayists in
England. Johnson's essays appear during the 1750s in various similar publications.
[7]�As a result of the focus on journals, the term also acquired a meaning
synonymous with "article", although the content may not the strict definition. On
the other hand, Locke's�An Essay Concerning Human Understanding�is not an essay at
all, or cluster of essays, in the technical sense, but still it refers to the
experimental and tentative nature of the inquiry which the philosopher was
undertaking.[7]
In the 18th and 19th centuries,�Edmund Burke�and�Samuel Taylor Coleridge�wrote
essays for the general public. The early 19th century, in particular, saw a
proliferation of great essayists in English�William Hazlitt,�Charles Lamb,�Leigh
Hunt�and�Thomas De Quincey�all penned numerous essays on diverse subjects, reviving
the earlier graceful style.�Thomas Carlyle's essays were highly influential, and
one of his readers,�Ralph Waldo Emerson, became a prominent essayist himself. Later
in the century,�Robert Louis Stevenson�also raised the form's literary level.[9]�In
the 20th century, a number of essayists, such as�T.S. Eliot, tried to explain the
new movements in art and culture by using essays.�Virginia Woolf,�Edmund Wilson,
and�Charles du Bos�wrote literary criticism essays.[8]
In France, several writers produced longer works wit