Thme Contested Space of the Essay

Let us begin – or assay to begin – with matters of definition. What is this thing that the thirty-five contributors to The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay discuss? It is fair to assume that most readers coming to this volume would be able to provide some kind of answer to this question, because the term ‘essay’ is used widely. However, the matter is nowhere near as straightforward as it might initially seem. One reason is that the term ‘essay’ might be generally known, but it carries different meanings in the different contexts in which it appears. Students and writing instructors in universities and colleges, for instance, might think of an essay as a short piece of writing used in myriad ways in various educational contexts. Here, what an ‘essay’ is expected to be may vary considerably in terms of style, structure, subject and voice. For some academic writers, an essay is an impersonal form with a relatively rigid structure based on the accumulation and presentation of research and knowledge for a readership of scholars. For others, the essay might be a freer textual space in which to explore and reflect on their observations of the world and life experiences.

The essay, however, has a long history predating and exceeding its contemporary pedagogical uses. Here – in its literary, political and theoretical contexts – defining the essay is perhaps even more problematic. Take, for instance, the following definition of the essay in a popular introduction to literature, which was widely used as a textbook for undergraduate students in English Studies in the late 1980s and 1990s: ‘The essay is at last a very flexible form. … Essays may be long or short, factual or fictional, practical or playful. They may serve any purpose and take any form that an essay wants to try out.’ To someone not familiar with the essay, this definition will seem unhelpfully vague because it suggests that the essay can be basically anything.

Two observations can provide context for the – admittedly somewhat extreme – cautiousness shown by Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus and Michael Silverman in this definition. Firstly, the problem of defining the essay is an issue that keeps reappearing – decades later – in the initial pages of books on the essay.