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Essayism
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Check link for latest rating. ( 1,114 ratings, 161 reviews)
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
Essayism is ideal for readers interested in literary criticism, essay lovers, students of contemporary arts and culture, and those curious about the evolving nature of non-fiction and creative writing forms.
A personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and its contemporary possibilities, itself an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive and at the same time held together by a personal voice and a polemical point.
Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and
still learning, it may not be perfect - your
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Description
The essay is a venerable form that may well be the genre of the future. It has its origins in a mode of self-examination and even self-obsession - 'it is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts', writes Montaigne in his essay 'Of Practice' - but it is just as accurately defined by its vagrant and curious scope, its capacity to suborn any and every object to its elegant remit. It may not in fact be 'well made' at all, but a thing of fragments and unfinished apercus, or an omnium-gatherum like Robert Burton's capacious but recognizably essayistic Anatomy of Melancholy.
The essay may not even be written, but instead a photo essay, film essay, radio essay or some hybrid of these and the literary archetype. It may belong to a self-conscious genre and have been written by an essayist who self-declares as such; or it might be conjured from a milieu where the labels 'essay' and 'essayist' would make no sense at all. The essay, in short, is a varied and various artefact. Its occasion might be scholarly - there are academic essays, though they tend to be essays to the extent that they wish to stop being academic - or it may be journalistic, institutional or 'creative'. The essay can be tethered to a specific (perhaps polemical) context or written with an ambition to timeless or universal import. Whatever its motivation or avowed theme, the essay possesses a style and a voice. Generic, structural and contextual definitions will vary, but the essay is at least recognizable by its having a certain texture - the essay alters or interferes to some degree with the language of non-fiction.
Essayism is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and its contemporary possibilities, itself an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive and at the same time held together by a personal voice and a polemical point.
'Dillon is a literary flaneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin - it is its own kind of self-made masterpiece.' - John Banville, Irish Times
Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
Praised by John Banville in the Irish Times as a "wonderful, subtle and deceptively fragmentary little book" and a "self-made masterpiece," Essayism is celebrated for its elegant and light-fingered prose. Maggie Nelson commends it as a "surprising, probing, edifying, itinerant, and eventually quite moving book" that reveals how literature and language profoundly touch life. The book is noted for its delicate, digressive style and its blend of critical and personal reflection.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781910695418
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 07 June 2017
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 125.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 152
Collections
About the Author
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, frieze and Artforum. He is UK editor of Cabinet magazine, and teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary, University of London.
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