The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay

The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay distinguishes itself by the wide range and scope of its themes, voices and approaches. Thirty-five leading essayists, literary critics and writing instructors explore the essay from multiple perspectives, including its theories, forms and histories as well as its cultural, political and pedagogical contexts. In particular, the volume extends the theory of the essay by addressing topics such as the construction of an essayistic self and the political dimensions of essaying. It further explores the relationship between the essay and other forms, such as philosophical writing, the column, science writing, the novel, the lyric and the advert as well as the essay in digital spaces.

Mario Aquilina is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches and researches the essay, literary theory, Shakespeare and modernist literature. He has edited The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and authored The Event of Style in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Aquilina has published widely on literature, literary theory and the essay in book chapters and in journals such as Oxford Literary Review, Cahiers Elisabethains, CounterText, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies and electronicbookreview.

Nicole B. Wallack is the Director of the Undergraduate Writing Program and Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. She is the author of Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies (Utah State UP, 2017). She is also a senior faculty associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College where she designs and leads professional development workshops and seminars for educators across disciplines and educational contexts. Wallack publishes and teaches in the fields of essay studies, writing studies, English education, and educational history.

Bob Cowser Jr. is Professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, where he has taught courses in nonfiction writing, film and American literature since 1998. He is the author of three nonfiction books and editor of a fourth, most recently Green Fields, Crime Punishment and a Boyhood Between (UNO Press 2010), which won ＂Best Memoir 2010＂ from the Adirondack Center for Writers and was cited in Best American Essays. Cowser is also the editor of Why We’re Here: Essayists on Living Upstate (Colgate UP 2010) and serves as advisory editor to the online journal ASSAY: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.