The essay has long been neglected in literary history: the only substantial single-author history of the essay remains Hugh Walker’s The English Essay and Essayists (1915). There has been more work on the pedagogical essay in composition studies, notably the seminal articles and books by Sharon Crowley, such as her Composition in the University (1998). However, the last few years have seen a sudden explosion of essay scholarship beginning with On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (2020), taken up by The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022), The Cambridge Companion to the Essay (2022), and soon to be capped by the two-volume Cambridge History of the British Essay and the Cambridge History of the American Essay (2024).

This new scholarship allows for fresh consideration of three crucial questions. First, how and why did the modern pedagogical essay emerge in the mid-to-late nineteenth-century in Britain and the US? Second, how does the pedagogical essay relate to literary and public essays as practised outside schools and universities? And, third, how should we teach the essay now, both as a medium of student work and as an object of literary and cultural study? These questions map onto not only different forms of the essay, but also the disciplinary division between scholars of rhetoric, composition, and literature. The speakers and presider on this panel have taken the lead in asking these questions, in their teaching, their writing, and their editing of On Essays, The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay, and The Cambridge Companion to the Essay.

Thomas Karshan will begin by setting out the distinction between “essay” and the “theme” before the nineteenth century. Until that time, the essay was largely considered inappropriate for pedagogical contexts and was reserved for men of letters. Rather, school-pupils and university students wrote themes, usually in Latin, according to the patterns of classical rhetoric, and using commonplaces from ancient literature. Drawing on archival sources, Karshan will analyse school-themes and essays by Coleridge, de Quincey, and others, in order to make two arguments: first, that many of the oratorical structures of the modern pedagogical essay are traceable back to the theme; and, second, that the Romantic literary essay was born from a deliberate play with those structures.

Jon Klancher will then trace the emergence of the academic essay from the crisis of classical rhetoric in the mid 19^th century and to the rise of information-based essays in English, Scottish, and then American teaching from 1860-1920. In the 1860s the old Oxbridge preferment system was leveled by new measures designed to implement meritocracy, particularly public examinations for civil service positions in Britain and India. He will focus on the loss of two key parts of the rhetorical legacy during this process—invention and commonplacing—that enabled Scottish essay pedagogy under the influence of Alexander Bain to shift rapidly toward a managerial model of the essay, or what rhetoricians now call the “Contemporary-Traditional Rhetoric”. This helped reduce the academic essay to the five-paragraph compositional workhorse it was becoming by 1900. American universities took up this program, first at Harvard in the 1870s, and built a CTR based essay pedagogy that lasted almost unchallenged until the rise of writing programs and new rhetorical scholarship in the 1970s.

Finally, Nicole Wallack will focus on the relation of the pedagogical, literary and public essays in the American nineteenth century. She will discuss discussing efforts to standardize literacy education in high school and college. In 1874, for the first time, incoming students at Harvard University were required to write a composition in an hour in response to a subject given to them. Two years later, high school students in New York state sat for the new Regents examinations in composition. Yet in the wider public sphere, nineteenth-century American writers defied these institutional structures to experiment widely in concept and form, in stark contrast to the strictures of school-based writing: among others Washington Irving and Sara Willis (better known as “Fanny Fern”), and prominent Black authors such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart, and Francis Watkins Harper. The divisions between school-life and the public sphere have persisted into the 21st century, despite the fact that American high school students encounter ‘canonical’ essays in their required composition courses, and particularly in courses focused on college-readiness. Wallack will conclude with recommendations about how current research in the emerging field of essay studies suggests richer ways to incorporate the study of essays in school.

Wittman will then lead a discussion of at least 20 minutes.