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

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STATUS OF THE GENRE

Agnes Repplier

SOURCE: "The Passing of the Essay," in In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894, pp. 226-35.

[Repplier was an American essayist during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A prolific writer, she published thirteen volumes of familiar essays. In the following work, Repplier claims that reports of the familiar essay's death are exaggerated.]

It is the curious custom of modern men of letters to talk to the world a great deal about their work; to explain its conditions, to uphold its value, to protest against adverse criticism, and to interpret the needs and aspirations of mankind through the narrow medium of their own resources. A good many years have passed since Mr. Arnold noticed the growing tendency to express the very ordinary desires of very ordinary people by such imposing phrases as "laws of human progress" and "edicts of the national mind."...

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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