Essayism On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction
- Submitting institution
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Queen Mary University of London
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1461
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Fitzcarraldo
- ISBN
- 9781681372839
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2018
- 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
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Essayism deploys memoir, polemic, close critical analysis and experimentation to synthesise current thinking about the essay, and to develop new versions of the form. Dillon analyses the history of the form, from early essays by Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne, through the subjective voice in Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion, to formal experiments by William Gass and Georges Perec. Dillon’s research also included essays by William Carlos Williams, Cyril Connolly, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Maeve Brennan. It is structured around specific essayistic modes or strategies: the fragment, the list, the personal voice, the detail, the aphorism, and digression. These are both enacted and described, as their centrality is tested in the form of the book rather than assumed.
Research questions initially probed the contemporary resurgence of the essay, seeking to understand what personal, cultural, political anxieties were being answered by the genre. During the process of research and composition, it became clear the book was also about its own form, and posing another question: what style, voice or structure best describes the essay today? How much of personal, apparently tangential, personal material, may be justified or necessary? The book consequently became a memoir of sorts, exploring specifically the relations between essayism and depression and melancholia.
US edition: Essayism: On For, Feeling, and Nonfiction (New York: NYRB, 2018). Portuguese edition: Ensaísmo (Porto: Bazarov, 2020). Translations forthcoming in Italian and Spanish. Dillon’s writing on the essay has been published in the TLS and The New Yorker. Reviews of the volume were published in The Irish Times, Guardian, London Review of Books, Financial Times, LA Review of Books, Los Angeles Times and New York Times.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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