The Cambridge History of the American Essay

Christy Wampole is an essayist and professor at Princeton University. She has published two scholarly books, Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in 21st-Century France (2020) and Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (2016), and a collection of essays titled The Other Serious: Essays for the New American Generation (2015). Jason Childs is a writer and independent scholar based in Berlin and Dijon. He has published research on the essay in The Cambridge Companion to the Essay (2022), The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022), and The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021).

Notes on contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction Christy Wampole; Part I. The Emergence of the American Essay (1710–1865); 1. Essays to do good: puritanism and the birth of the American essay Jan Stievermann; 2. Prattlers, meddlers, bachelors, busy-bodies: the periodical essay in the eighteenth century Richard Squibbs; 3. The federalist and the founders Matthew Garrett; 4. American nature writing: 1700–1900 Noah Rawlings; 5. The essay and transcendentalism Laura Dassow Walls; 6. Old world Shadows in the new: Europe and the nineteenth-century American essay Philip Coleman; 7. Poet-essayists and magazine culture in the nineteenth century John Michael; 8. Antebellum women essayists Charlene Avallone; Part II. Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945); 9. Writing freedom before and after emancipation Kinohi Nishikawa; 10. Social justice and the American essay Christy Wampole; 11. 'Zones of contention' in the genteel essay Jenny Spinner; 12. The American comic essay David E. E. Sloane; 13. Nineteenth-century American travel essays: aesthetics, modernity, and national identity Brigitte Bailey; 14. American pragmatism: an essayistic conception of truth Jonathan Levin; 15. The essay in the Harlem renaissance Shawn Anthony Christian; 16. The southern agrarians and the new criticism Sarah E. Gardner; 17. Subjective and objective: newspaper columns William E. Dow; 18. The experience of art: the essay in visual culture Tom Huhn; 19. The essay in American music Kyle Gann; Part III: Postwar Essays and Essayism (1945–2000); 20. The essay and the twentieth-century literary magazine Eleni Theodoropoulos; 21. Germans in Amerika: written possibility, uninhabitable reality Florian Fuchs; 22. The essay and the American left Andrea Capra; 23. The native American essay Hertha D. Sweet Wong; 24. Conservatism and the essay Jeffrey R. Dudas; 25. Opinions and decisions: legal essays Peter Goodrich; 26. World War Two to #MeToo: the personal and the political in the American feminist essay Ellena Savage; 27. Self-portraits in a convex mirror: the essay in American poetry Lucy Alford; 28. The American essay and (social) science Ted Anton; 29. Philosophy as a kind of writing Paul Jenner; 30. The essay and literary postmodernism: seriousness and exhaustion Stefano Ercolino; Part IV: Toward the Contemporary American Essay (2000–2020); 31. The American essay film: a neglected genre Nora M. Alter; 32. Literary theory, criticism, and the essay Carolina Iribarren; 33. Gender, queerness, and the American essay David Lazar; 34. Disability and the American essay Anne Finger; 35. The radical hybridity of the lyric essay Michael Askew; 36. Writing migration: multiculturalism, democracy, and the essay form Cyrus R.K. Patell; 37. Latinx culture and the essay Yolanda Padilla; 38. Black experience through the essay Walton Muyumba; 39. The essay and the anthropocene David Carlin; Recommendations for Further Reading; Index.