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The Lost Origins of the Essay (A New History of the Essay)
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About The Lost Origins Of The Essay
Product Description An expansive and exhilarating world tour of innovative nonfiction writing I think the reason we've never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because we've never agreed on what the genre even is. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It's not very clear sometimes. This, then, is a book that tries to offer a clear objective: I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce.John D'Agata leaves no tablet unturned in his exploration of the roots of the essay. The Lost Origins of the Essay takes the reader from ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome, from fifth-century Japan to nineteenth-century France, to modern Brazil, Germany, Barbados, and beyond. With brief and brilliant introductions to seminal works by Heraclitus, Sei Sho-nagon, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, and more than forty other luminaries, D'Agata reexamines the international forebears of today's American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to D'Agata's The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay. From Publishers Weekly From Ziusudra of Sumer to Antonin Artaud and beyond, the essay in all its glory is on full display in this ingenious anthology. The title doesn't convey the volume's range—the spirit of factual expression, worked on by the imagination, transplanted into many times and in many cultures. This is a book to dip into or read through, certainly to savor for its diversity. The essay tent is wide, and under D'Agata's ( Halls of Fame) editorship and astute eye it includes hybrid forms, from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell through the prose poems of Aloysius Bertrand, Baudelaire and Mallarmé to a performative essay on Bob Marley by Kamau Brathwaite. Readers will be familiar with the aphorisms of Francis Bacon, somewhat less familiar with the eccentric virtuosity of Sir Thomas Browne and much more so with Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. But readers are perhaps most likely to be turned on for the first time by the prose artistry of Matsuo Basho, the avant-garde musings of Clarice Lispector on the (not-so) simple egg and the obsessive documentarylike musings of Marguerite Duras. Overall, this imaginative international collection showcases the art of short nonfiction at its best. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author John D'Agata is the author of Halls of Fame and the editor of The Next American Essay. He teaches in the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa and is the editor of lyric essays for Seneca Review.
