Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Familiar Essay - Overview Of The Genre

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OVERVIEW OF THE GENRE

Arthur C. Benson

SOURCE: "On Essays at Large," in The Living Age, Vol. XLVI, No. 3423, February 12, 1910, pp. 408-15.

[Benson was an English educator and author. A prolific poet, novelist, and biographer, he is best known as an essayist. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in the Cormhill Magazine, Benson approaches a definition of the essay and touches upon the accomplishment of several key writers of the familiar essay, including Lamb, Thackeray, and Stevenson.]

There is no word which it seems harder to define than the word Essay; it seems as difficult to describe as the quality of justice in Plato's "Republic," which turned out to be the one indefinable and essential principle that was left, like Argon, when all the other qualities that go to the making up of the state were subtracted. Similarly, when all other forms of human composition have been classified, the...

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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