On Essays : Montaigne to the Present
- Submitting institution
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The University of East Anglia
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 184165040
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- OUP Oxford
- ISBN
- 9780198707868
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Commissioned by OUP in 2013, On Essays appeared in 2020 after many years of careful editorial work which involved both editors commissioning and liaising with 17 contributors, painstakingly editing each chapter three times, and producing a book of 160,000 words. Karshan's own work on the project involved mastering the history of an entire genre and doing extensive research on Woolf for the 14,000-word co-authored introduction and his own 11,500-word chapter.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Sometimes described as the fourth genre, the essay is fundamental to the history of English literature and its crossovers with non-literary genres, yet there is to date only one really substantial account of the history of the essay in English, Hugh Walker’s The English Essay and Essayists (1915). Chevalier’s Encyclopedia of the Essay (1997) is a factual handbook, while Good’s Observing the Self (1988) and Butrym’s Essays on the Essay (1989) are lightly researched. On Essays does not aspire to be a comprehensive history of the essay in English, but, rather, a series of seventeen originally researched essays on major themes in the history of the genre, written by celebrated essayists and scholars – which, taken together, form the most substantial book on the essay in English published since 1915. Major themes and issues in the form are approached through focussed case studies, generating new insights into individual essayists, read in the context of the essay’s long history, and also into the continuities of the genre, among them new explorations of miscellaneity, association, the anti-methodical, and the essay’s ongoing complex relations with philosophy and the novel.
Karshan and his co-editor worked from 2011 to 2020 together on all aspects, from conceptualisation and proposal, through commissioning. Every piece apart from Adam Phillips’s was minutely co-edited, and went through at least three drafts so as to reach the highest standard. Karshan’s own contribution consists both in his 11,500 word opening chapter, ‘What is an Essay?’, which attempts a fresh answer to this fundamental question by connecting one Woolf essay to the total history of the genre, and also the co-authored 14,000 word introduction, which is more than an overview of the book to follow but itself contains much fresh research and insight, also into the question of what an essay is.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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