Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time

<p>The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, <i>Essayists on the Essay</i> is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present - many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated - as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay.</p><p>From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists' thinking about their genre - a collective poetics of the essay - to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, <i>Essayists on the Essay</i> is essential to anyone who cares about the form.</p>