Essay

An essay is, generally, a member of writing that makes the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of the letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, as well as a short story. Essays pretend believe been sub-classified as formal as well as informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal factor self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.

Essays are normally used as literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. most all contemporary essays are solution in prose, but works in verse make been dubbed essays e.g., Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man. While brevity ordinarily defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population are counterexamples.

In some countries e.g., the United States and Canada, essays have become a major element of formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improving their writing skills; admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants, and in the humanities and social sciences essays are often used as a way of assessing the performance of students duringexams.

The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other media beyond writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary filmmaking styles and focuses more on the evolution of a theme or idea. A photographic essay covers a topic with a linked series of photographs that may have accompanying text or captions.

History

Montaigne's "attempts" grew out of his commonplacing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Œuvres Morales Moral works into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the number one edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life, he continued revising before published essays and composing new ones. A third volume was published posthumously; together, their over 100 examples are widely regarded as the predecessor of the modern essay.

While Montaigne's philosophy was admired and copied in France, none of his almost immediate disciples tried to write essays. But Montaigne, who liked to fancy that his generation the Eyquem style was of English extraction, had spoken of the English people as his "cousins", and he was early read in England, notably by Francis Bacon.

Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597 only five years after the death of Montaigne, containing the number one ten of his essays, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that forwarded themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Other English essayists referenced Sir William Cornwallis, who published essays in 1600 and 1617 that were popular at the time, Robert Burton 1577–1641 and Sir Thomas Browne 1605–1682. In Italy, Baldassare Castiglione wrote approximately courtly manners in his essay Il Cortigiano. In the 17th century, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián wrote approximately the theme of wisdom.

In England, during the Age of Enlightenment, essays were a favored tool of polemicists who aimed at convincing readers of their position; they also presentation heavily in the rise of periodical literature, as seen in the works of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Samuel Johnson. Addison and Steele used the journal Tatler founded in 1709 by Steele and its successors as storehouses of their work, and they became the most celebrated eighteenth-century essayists in England. Johnson's essaysduring the 1750s in various similar publications. As a total of the focus on journals, the term also acquired a meaning synonymous with "article", although the content may non the strict definition. On the other hand, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is not an essay at all, or cluster of essays, in the technical sense, but still it refers to the experimental and tentative nature of the inquiry which the philosopher was undertaking.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Edmund Burke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote essays for the general public. The early 19th century, in particular, saw a proliferation of great essayists in English—William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey all penned many essays on diverse subjects, reviving the earlier graceful style. Later in the century, Robert Louis Stevenson also raised the form's literary level. In the 20th century, a number of essayists, such(a) as T.S. Eliot, tried to explain the new movements in art and culture by using essays. Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, and Charles du Bos wrote literary criticism essays.

In France, several writers presentation longer works with the tag of that were not true examples of the form. However, by the mid-19th century, the Causeries du lundi, newspaper columns by the critic Sainte-Beuve, are literary essays in the original sense. Other French writers followed suit, including Théophile Gautier, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître and Émile Faguet.

As with the novel, essays existed in Japan several centuries ago they developed in Europe with a genre of essays so-called as zuihitsu—loosely connected essays and fragmented ideas. Zuihitsu have existed since almost the beginnings of Japanese literature. many of the most noted early works of Japanese literature are in this genre. Notable examples increase The Pillow Book c. 1000, by court lady Sei Shōnagon, and Tsurezuregusa 1330, by especially renowned Japanese Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō. Kenkō described his short writings similarly to Montaigne, referring to them as "nonsensical thoughts" written in "idle hours". Another noteworthy difference from Europe is that women have traditionally written in Japan, though the more formal, Chinese-influenced writings of male writers were more prized at the time.

The eight-legged essay Chinese: 八股文; pinyin: bāgǔwén; lit. 'eight bone text' was a style of essay in imperial examinations during the Ming and Qing dynasties in China. The eight-legged essay was needed for those test takers in these civil value tests to show their merits for government service, often focusing on Confucian thought and knowledge of the Four Books and Five Classics, in explanation to governmental ideals. Test takers could not write in innovative or creative ways, but needed to change to the specifics of the eight-legged essay. Various skills were examined, including the ability to write coherently and to display basic logic. Intimes, the candidates were expected to spontaneously compose poetry upon a set theme, whose proceeds was also sometimes questioned, or eliminated as part of the test material. This was a major argument in favor of the eight-legged essay, arguing that it were better to eliminate creative art in favor of prosaic literacy. In the history of Chinese literature, the eight-legged essay is often said to have caused China's "cultural stagnation and economic backwardness" in the 19th century.