Abstract
A fresh look at a venerable, resurgent literary form. essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a greased pig, for example, or a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit. In Tracing Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces very qualities that have moved others to accord essay second-class citizenship in world of letters. Drawing from work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what essay means - and how it comes to mean. essay, related to essaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. The essay was, historically, notes Atkins, the first form to take experience of individual and make it stuff of literature. Atkins also considers essay's basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is home-cosmography, to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of essay's supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that essay exhibits a certain sneakiness as it proceeds in, through, and by means of small and mundane toward spiritual and revelatory.
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