The Cambridge History of the American Essay

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.