Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Familiar Essay - Definitions And Origins

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DEFINITIONS AND ORIGINS

Elizabeth Drew

SOURCE: "The Essay," in The Enjoyment of Literature, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1935, pp. 38-61.

[In the following excerpt, Drew traces the development of the familiar essay from Montaigne and Bacon through the periodical essayists of the eighteenth century and on to the era of Robert Louis Stevenson.]

The essay is the simplest of all forms of literature, but with it we enter that world where we shall remain throughout the rest of this book, the world of the conscious art of writing. From the lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the most complex kinds of literature, we shall find henceforth that the enjoyment of it is always twofold. There is the pleasure we receive from the conscious stimulus of certain recognizable parts of our being: to our curiosity about the stories and situations of other human beings, to our emotions, to our intellectual faculties, to our moral nature, to...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Definitions And Origins
4. Overview Of The Genre
5. Elements Of Form And Style
6. Elements Of Content
7. The Cockneys: Hazlitt, Lamb, And Hunt
8. Status Of The Genre
9. Further Reading
10. Copyright

1. Essay