essay
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What is an essay in literature?
In literature, an essay is an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition, usually shorter, less systematic, and formal than a dissertation or thesis. Essays often address a subject from a limited and personal perspective.
The flexibility, brevity, potential for ambiguity, and allusions to current events make the essay an ideal tool for philosophical reformers. Figures of speech, like metaphors, enhance the texture and structure of essays, influencing both the writer's expression and the reader's response.
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What are the main types of essays?
An essay is a literary composition, usually shorter and less formal than a dissertation or thesis, that analyzes or interprets a topic, often from a personal perspective.
Essays became a vehicle for social and religious criticism during the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Traditionalists also adopted the essay to educate the masses. Some essayists have used the form for literary criticism, while in other countries, the essay became nationalistic, polemical, or semipolitical.
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How is an essay different from a story or a poem?
An essay differs from a story or poem through its purpose and structure. An essay is an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition dealing with a subject from a limited, often personal, point of view. Essays are typically shorter, less systematic, and less formal than dissertations or theses.
Stories, also called narratives, relate events, usually in the order in which they happened. Poems utilize rhythm and sound, and are recognized by their appearance on the page.
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How do writers use essays to share ideas or arguments?
Essays allow writers to explore ideas and construct arguments through a flexible, personal lens. The essay's nature makes it an ideal medium for social and religious criticism, suiting philosophical reformers because of its adaptability and potential for ambiguity. Writers can use essays to educate the masses by expressing genteel traditions or to share lighter observations. The essay is a means of self-discovery, and writers master the essay as a form of literary criticism. Rhetorical devices can help to discuss and isolate ideas that might otherwise become abstract and confusing.
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What makes a literary essay different from other kinds of essays?
A literary essay is an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition that is shorter, less systematic, and less formal than a dissertation or thesis. Literary essays often deal with a subject from a limited and personal point of view. The flexibility, brevity, potential for ambiguity, and allusions to current events make the essay an ideal tool for philosophical reformers and traditionalists alike.
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essay, an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view.
Some early treatises—such as those of Cicero on the pleasantness of old age or on the art of “divination,” Seneca on anger or clemency, and Plutarch on the passing of oracles—presage to a certain degree the form and tone of the essay, but not until the late 16th century was the flexible and deliberately nonchalant and versatile form of the essay perfected by the French writer Michel de Montaigne. Choosing the name essai to emphasize that his compositions were attempts or endeavours, a groping toward the expression of his personal thoughts and experiences, Montaigne used the essay as a means of self-discovery. His Essais, published in their final form in 1588, are still considered among the finest of their kind. Later writers who most nearly recall the charm of Montaigne include, in England, Robert Burton, though his whimsicality is more erudite, Sir Thomas Browne, and Laurence Sterne, and in France, with more self-consciousness and pose, André Gide and Jean Cocteau.
At the beginning of the 17th century, social manners, the cultivation of politeness, and the training of an accomplished gentleman became the theme of many essayists. This theme was first exploited by the Italian Baldassare Castiglione in his Il libro del cortegiano (1528; The Book of the Courtier). The influence of the essay and of genres allied to it, such as maxims, portraits, and sketches, proved second to none in molding the behavior of the cultured classes, first in Italy, then in France, and, through French influence, in most of Europe in the 17th century. Among those who pursued this theme was the 17th-century Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián in his essays on the art of worldly wisdom.
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Keener political awareness in the 18th century, the age of Enlightenment, made the essay an all-important vehicle for the criticism of society and religion. Because of its flexibility, its brevity, and its potential both for ambiguity and for allusions to current events and conditions, it was an ideal tool for philosophical reformers. The Federalist Papers in America and the tracts of the French Revolutionaries are among the countless examples of attempts during this period to improve the human condition through the essay.
The genre also became the favoured tool of traditionalists of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Edmund Burke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who looked to the short, provocative essay as the most potent means of educating the masses. Essays such as Paul Elmer More’s long series of Shelburne Essays (published between 1904 and 1935), T.S. Eliot’s After Strange Gods (1934) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), and others that attempted to reinterpret and redefine culture, established the genre as the most fitting to express the genteel tradition at odds with the democracy of the new world.
Whereas in several countries the essay became the chosen vehicle of literary and social criticism, in other countries the genre became semipolitical, earnestly nationalistic, and often polemical, playful, or bitter. Essayists such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Willa Cather wrote with grace on several lighter subjects, and many writers—including Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, and Charles du Bos—mastered the essay as a form of literary criticism.