Essays

Morrison, R (2024) 'Essays.' In: Morrison, R, ed. The Oxford handbook of British Romantic prose. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 807-824. ISBN 9780198834540

Abstract

The Romantic essay took many different forms to strikingly different ends. Some versions of it appeared as book-length arguments that were designed to convince readers of a certain point of view, including Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and Hannah More’s Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of St Paul. But the vast majority of Romantic essays were shorter pieces first published in the periodicals, including the mordant reviews of Francis Jeffrey, the epistolary articles of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the raucous dialogues of John Wilson, and the dynamic sketches of Charles Dickens. Most notably, liberal-minded magazines like the London and the New Monthly fostered a new kind of personal essay that expanded and reworked eighteenth-century iterations of the form, and that reached its highest points in the writings of Thomas De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt.

Item Type:	Book Chapter or Section
Keywords:	essays as reviews, essays as letters, essays as dialogues, sketches, familiar essayists, Thomas De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt
Divisions:	Chancelry and Research Management
Date Deposited:	20 May 2024 14:57
Last Modified:	30 May 2024 18:57
URI / Page ID:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/16267

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