Reading Essays

An Invitation

G. Atkins

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780820330303, 9780820328263
• eBook ISBN: 9780820336534
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Approaches abound to help us beneficially, enjoyably read fiction, poetry, and drama. Here, for the first time, is a book that aims to do the same for the essay. G. Douglas Atkins performs sustained readings of more than twenty-five major essays, explaining how we can appreciate and understand what this currently resurgent literary form reveals about the "art of living."

Atkins's readings cover a wide spectrum of writers in the English language—and his readings are themselves essays, gracefully written, engaged, and engaging. Atkins starts with the earliest British practitioners of the form, including Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are included, as are works by Americans James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and E. B. White. Atkins also provides readings of a number of contemporary essayists, among them Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Cynthia Ozick.

Many of the readings are of essays that Atkins has used successfully in the classroom, with undergraduate and graduate students, for many years. In his introduction Atkins offers practical advice on the specific demands essays make and the unique opportunities they offer, especially for college courses. The book ends with a note on the writing of essays, furthering the author's contention that reading should not be separated from writing.

Reading Essays continues in the tradition of such definitive texts as Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. Throughout, Atkins reveals the joy, delight, grace, freedom, and wisdom of "the glorious essay."

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Texts
• Essaying to Be: On Reading (and Writing) Essays
• The Advent of Personality and the Beginning of the Essay: Montaigne and Bacon
• “The Passionate Discourse of an Amateur”: John Dryden’s Prose and Poetic Essays
• With Wit Enough to Manage Judgment: Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism
• It’s Not an Essay: Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and the Immodesty of Satire
• Turning Inside Out: Samuel Johnson’s “The Solitude of the Country”
• An Allegory of Essaying? Process and Product inWilliam Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey”
• The Risk of Not Being: RalphWaldo Emerson’s “Illusions”
• Forging in the Smithy of the Mind: Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” and the Problematic of Transcendence
• Estranging the Familiar: Alice Meynell’s “Solitudes”
• By Indirections Find Directions Out”: Hilaire Belloc’s “The Mowing of a Field”
• Essaying and the Strain of Incarnational Thinking: G. K. Chesterton’s “A Piece of Chalk”
• Homage to the Common Reader: Or How Should One Read Virginia Woolf ’s “The Death of the Moth”?
• The Turning of the Essay: T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
• A Site to Behold: Richard Selzer’s “A Worm from My Notebook”
• The Discarnate Word: Scott Russell Sanders’s “Silence”
• “Love Came to Us Incarnate”: Annie Dillard’s “God in the Doorway”
• A Free Intelligence”: George Orwell, the Essay, and “Reflections on Gandhi”
• Where “Trifles Rule Like Tyrants”: Cynthia Ozick’s “The Seam of the Snail”
• Essaying and Pen Passion: Anne Fadiman as Common Reader in “Eternal Ink”
• Acts of Simplifying: Sense and Sentences in Sam Pickering’s “Composing a Life”
• Caged Lions and Sustained Sibilants: E. B. White as “Recording Secretary” in “The Ring of Time”
• Her Oyster Knife Sharpened: Control of Tone in Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
• The Basic Ingredient: Candor and Compassion in Nancy Mairs’s “On Being a Cripple”
• The Work of the Sympathetic Imagination: James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son”
• “On a Line Between Two Sturdy Poles”: Edward Hoagland’s “What I Think, What I Am”
• A Note on Writing the Essay: The Issue of Process versus Product (with an essay by Cara McConnell)
• Works Cited