Thomas Karshan has been a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard, a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford, and Leverhulme Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. He served from 2019 to 2020 as President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society and is the author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (OUP, 2011), the editor of Nabokov's Collected Poems (Penguin / Knopf 2012), and the co-translator, with Anastasia Tolstoy, of Nabokov's verse-play The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Penguin / Knopf 2012). He is now a Senior Lecturer in Literature and University Teaching Fellow at the University of East Anglia, where he teaches modules on modernism, nonsense, play, parody, and consciousness. He has a keen interest in creative-critical writing and teaching, and as such serves on the board of the Beyond Criticism book series and is the editor of the Beyond Criticism website.

Kathryn Murphy is Fellow in English Literature at Oriel College, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Her academic work focuses on Renaissance poetry and philosophy, and on the literary essay. She is also a critic and essayist, writing regularly about still life painting for Apollo Magazine, and reviewing Czech literature for the TLS. She is currently writing two books: The Tottering Universal: Metaphysical Prose in the Seventeenth Century; and Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy, a study of distraction, attention, and The Anatomy of Melancholy.

• Introduction: On the difficulty of introducing a work of this kind


• 1: Thomas Karshan: What is an Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf


• 2: Warren Boutcher: The Montaignian Essay and Authored Miscellanies from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century


• 3: Kathryn Murphy: Of Sticks and Stones: The Essay, Experience, and Experiment


• 4: Markman Ellis: Time and the Essay: The Spectator and Diurnal Fomr


• 5: Fred Parker: The Sociable Philosopher: David Hume and the Philosophical Essay


• 6: Scott Black: Tristram Shandy, Essayist


• 7: Denise Gigante: On Coffee Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition


• 8: Gregory Dart: The Romantic Essay and the City


• 9: Felicity James: Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity


• 10: Tom Wright: Carlyle, Emerson, and the Voiced Essay


• 11: Ophelia Field: Retiring or Engaging: Politics in the English Essay


• 12: Stefano Evangelista: Things Said By The Way: Walter Pater and the Essay


• 13: Bharat Tandon: 'Strips of Essayism': Eliot, Hardy, and the Victorian Periodical Essay


• 14: Michael Wood: Rational Distortions: Essays in the British Novel After Borges


• 15: Ned Stuckey-French: Creative Non-Fiction and the Lyric Essay: The American Essay in the Twenty-First Century


• 16: Adam Phillips: Up To A Point: The Psychoanalyst and the Essay


• 17: Christy Wampole: Dalí's Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice