I'm writing a, you guessed it, essay, about the development of the essay. I'm not asking you to do my work for me, but any thoughts or resources you may have would be lovely to help me get the ball rolling. This is not for school but for my own personal edification, and to sort out a longstanding feud with my english teaching mother.
I know that the essay developed in importance in the renaissance and that it continued as a major writing form in England after that. Are there any historical clues as to why this was the case and why writers moved away from the earlier Platonic (or otherwise) dialogues, to the essays of Montaignes and others from the 16th-18th century, and finaly into the sort of thing we use to write about "How Lord of the Flies is Basically About God and Such" in our English courses today.
Any help is much appreciated.
This is a great question, and I hope someone can answer it. I pinged the two flaired users who specialize in the history of rhetoric, so hopefully one of them can help.
In the meantime, I'm going to reconsider my complaints about undergraduate essays when I imagine what an undergraduate dialogue might look like.
Well, it looks like I'm going to get very meta here, but I remembered reading an essay, about essays two years ago, from my English 100 class at CC. To avoid plagiarizing and because my knowledge of the subject is minimal at best, I'll paraphrase a bit, but do a lot of quoting where necessary.
The word essay is lent from the French "essay," derived from the French verb "essayer," meaning to try or attempt.
The word "essay" suggests less a formal and systematic approach to a topic than a casual, even random one.
The roots of the modern essay come from Plutarch and Seneca in the Western world.
…writer Plutarch (46-120), whose Parallel Lives of noble Greeks and Romans influenced the art of biography, and who also wrote essays in his Moralia. The early Roman writer Seneca, a philosopher, dramatist, and orator, also wrote essays in the grand manner of classical oratory, on topics that include "Asthma" and "Noise."
In addition, the counterparts to the east are both Japanese: Sei Shonagon(10th C.), a court lady and Yoshida Kenko(1283-1350),
a poet and buddhist monk, whose brief, fragmentary essays echo the quick brushstrokes of Zen painting.
The essay in it's truer and more modern form began with Michel de Montaigne in France and Francis Bacon in England. Montaigne's first two books of essays came out simultaneously in 1580, while Bacon's came out in 1597. Both writers continued to release more essays, continually more complex.
Montaigne actually touched on a number of subjects
including virtue and vice, customs and behavior, children and cannibals.
To answer one of your questions even more directly,
Although Montaigne's first essays began as reflections about his reading and made liberal use of quoted passages, his later essays relied much less on external sources for impetus and inspiration
Contrarily, Montaigne's essays were very unfocused and from what I can tell, would be considered a poor essay today. Montaigne largely explored topics through his own mind's eye testing his own opinions and claims and often being very exploratory in nature.
The openness and flexibility of his essay form make its direction unpredictable, its argument arranged less as a logical structure than as a meandering exploration of its subject
On the other hand,
Bacon's essays differ from Montaigne's in striking ways. First, most of Bacon's essays are short. Second, his essays are much less personal than Montaigne's. And third, many of Bacon's essays offer advice on how to live.
The 18th century saw the exploration of more forms of essays including philosophical by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), satirical by Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Richard Steele (1672-1729), and Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).
The 19th century saw the rise of the essay less as moralistic and satirical than as entertaining and even a bit eccentric. Among the most notable practitioners were Charles Lamb (1775-1834), whose Essays of Elia and More Essays of Elia are constructed to read less like random assortments than as books centered on characters…
My book also mentions Emerson and Thoreau, which among all these great authors, I also cannot summarize. In ay case Thoreau's essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" is a very important and influential one to look into, as you might judge from the title.
If in one sense the Renaissance can be considered the beginnings of the modern essay, in another, the modern essay is synonymous with the twentieth-century essay, a period in which the essay developed into a literary genre that began to rival fiction and poetry in importance.
Notable authors of this period, that I continue to not be able to summarize include Orwell, Woolf, E.B. White, and James Baldwin.
Hope this was helpful, despite being riddled with quotation, but I'm no expert in this subject. If you have any questions, I'll see if my book can allow me to field them, otherwise an expert would be best suited.
Source: Diaynni, Robert, One Hundred Great Essays, Fourth Edition, 2011. Pp. 1-7.
Plutarch's Moralia certainly had an impact. There were also a number of rhetorical exercises called the progymnasmata that trained young rhētors on the art of discourse. Many of these can arguably be seen as precursors to what we today call the essay.