Introduction

Despite the emergence of increasingly transnational approaches to literary study, Asian writers’ engagements with the essay remain relatively overlooked. Comparative literature, Asian studies and world literature are, after all, relatively more recent sub-disciplines in the wider field of literary studies. In recent years, scholars have stressed the need to focus on the essay in eastern contexts. These accounts, however, remain sparse compared with those that focus on its western European contexts. As Jenny Spinner notes, criticism centered on the essay tends to explore the genre from a western focus:

Depending on the type of essay in discussion, one of two progenitors is named: the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, father of the informal essay, or the Englishman Francis Bacon, father of the formal. In the years since 1580 and 1601, when, respectively, Montaigne and Bacon published their first volumes of essays, writers and critics have wrangled over the ‘true’ characteristics of the essay in an attempt to nail down the form.

Plenty of studies have explored the essay through the lens of major American (and often modernist) writers and through wider anglophone contexts, but a more global consideration of the genre enables us to see how the form evolved in different contexts and with sometimes different purposes. Turning to Asia reveals a rich and varied essay tradition that can be traced back several centuries, with writer-philosophers such as Su Zhe, Wang Fu-chih and Sei Shōnagon all using the essay to different ends and purposes. Some studies have addressed the paucity of scholarship relating to the essay tradition in Asia. For Kirk A. Denton, the issue is one of pedagogy: the fact that ‘the essay is not often taught in the West in courses on modern Chinese literature’ implies, wrongly, that it is ‘a marginal genre’ for Asian writers. Far from existing as a marginal genre, the essay is a form that played a central role in the emergence of Asian migrant writing and transnational aesthetics across a variety of genres, including poetry and film.

This chapter focuses on the Asian essay in English. This is not to discount or ignore the non-anglophone Asian-authored essay, but rather to acknowledge that the breadth, history and geopolitical contexts of this tradition cannot be covered in a single chapter.