Descripción:
The essay as a genre has received little recent critical attention. While our understanding of the novel, poetry, drama, and to a lesser extent, the short story, has been considerably enriched through the application of various philosophies and contemporary literary theories such as phenomenology, reception theory, structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism etc., the essay is still largely defined in formalist and New Critical terms.

Notwithstanding the obvious pragmatic aspect of essayistic discourse, critics and theoreticians tend to stress its ‘literary’ nature. In the preface of literary Nonfiction (1989), Chris Anderson describes the essay as ‘reflective and exploratory and essentially personal. Its purpose is not to convey information, although it may do that as well, but rather to tell the story of the author’s thinking and experience’. Without denying the literary qualities of many essays, I suggest that our emphasis on this aspect has been excessive and has limited our understandingof individual essays and of the essay as a genre.
- FROM INTRODUCTION


CONTENTS:

Introduction......1

I. A theory of the essay......10

II. Voices and echos......30

III. Silences and Echos......53

IV. Voices, silences and echoes: The critical reception of naturalism in Spain 1870-1882......79

V. Voices, silences and echoes: The critical reception of naturalism in Spain 1882-1891......100

Conclusion......127

Works cited......131