The essay today is no longer the “little old lady of literature,” a “second-class citizen” of the literary marketplace.1 As Rebecca Solnit (2019: xxiii) remarks, ours is an “essayistic age.” This designation surely reflects the contemporary growth of creative nonfiction writing programs and the prominence of essay collections on today's bestseller lists (see Gutkind 2022). Claims like Solnit's also suggest that the essay bears some particular importance to public life, to our present exigencies and contemporary crises. Our social and political circumstances, Christy Wampole (2013) argues in the New York Times, call for “the essayification of everything”—that is, “a conscious and more reflective deployment of the essay's spirit in all aspects of life.” Alongside these public discussions, the essay has received a surge of attention in literary scholarship. Kara Wittman and Evan Kindley—the editors of the new Cambridge Companion to the Essay—argue...

You do not currently have access to this content.