Abstract
In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realising various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed generically or defined theoretically, while for these very reasons they are always required to explain themselves. The diverse and paradoxical answers which essayists have given as often as not derive from the meaning of the word essai in Montaigne or from his account of his writings, and give rise to metaphors which have in turn shaped the subjects of the essay over the centuries. The thirteen descriptions of the essay here brought to a focus through Woolf’s essay are that the essay is a destroyer of generic categories, an apprenticeship, a haunting, a room of one’s own, homework, a bookshop, an assay, a taste, a ramble, an assault, a deformity, a sport, and everything and nothing.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | On Essays |
| Subtitle of host publication | Montaigne to the Present |
| Editors | Thomas Karshan, Kathryn Murphy |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Chapter | 1 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780198707868 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780198707868 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Aug 2020 |
Keywords
- A room of one’s own
- Definition of the essay
- Deformity
- Montaigne
- Psychoanalysis
- Street-haunting
- The unconscious
- Theory of the essay
- Virginia woolf
- Wandering
Profiles
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Thomas Karshan
- School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing - Associate Professor in Literature
- East Centre: UEA Centre for the Study of East Central Europe and the Former Soviet Space - Member
- Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group - Member
Person: Research Group Member, Research Centre Member, Academic, Teaching & Research