Ebook: The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form

In the hands of such writers as Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, David Shields, Zadie Smith and many others, the essay has re-emerged as a powerful literary form for tackling a fractious 21st century culture. The Essay at the Limits brings together leading scholars to explore the poetics, the history and the future of the form. Alongside the new forms and new voices that have emerged in the 21st century essay, the book links these back to a longer history of the essay and its theorisation from the Romantics to modern writers such as Woolf and Coetzee and its influence on other contemporary cultural forms from the novel to music and film.
The book examines work by writers such as: Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anne Carson, Rachel Cusk, Joan Didion, Jean Genet, William Hazlitt, Samuel Johnson, Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Ben Lerner, Claudia Rankine, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Virginia Woolf.