Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > The Modern Essay - Overview

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OVERVIEW

Mary E. Rucker

SOURCE: "The Literary Essay and the Modern Temper," in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer, 1975, pp. 317-35.

[In the following essay, Rucker outlines the evolution of the modern essay.]

Although a generic definition is conspicuously absent in the large body of periodical literature devoted to the essay between 1880 and 1950, many American and British journalists and essayists debated its viability and its capacity to express the modern sensibility. The issue underlying the debate was, ultimately, the function of art in an era of dramatic social change. The seemingly blithe humanism that allowed the essay to reach its apogee in the early nineteenth century was rapidly undermined by the deterministic sciences and by the colossal growth of technology and industry. Each of these developments tended either to deny or to undercut the validity of spiritual realities and the imaginative...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Overview
4. The Essay In The Early Twentieth Century
5. Characteristics Of The Modern Essay
6. Modern Essayists
7. The Essay As A Literary Genre
8. Further Reading
9. Copyright

1. Essay