The Literary Essay in English
The conference took place July 2-3, 2011. In due course recordings will be out up on the website of talks, organised so that you can go immediately to the talk or discussion you want to listen to.
In the meantime, the recordings of the two days are available at:
Day 1 -
Day 2 -
Programme and speakers
Since Montaigne, the essay has been, alongside fiction, poetry, and drama, one of the major genres of literature, distinguished by its appeal to personal experience rather than institutional approval for authority. It is an intimate forum in which difficult political, scientific, and philosophical issues can be introduced to the general public, and to one another. Yet the essay has been almost completely neglected in literary studies, and in contemporary culture there is little understanding of the genre's history and importance. Its distinctive forms - experimental, exploratory, polemical, introspective, or conversational - have not been charted; nor have the themes which mark the essay through its history: dissent, whimsy, experience, experiment, conversation, unconscious experience, frailty, amateurism, friendship, and intimacy. In the public arena opportunities to publish essays are now very few: the tradition which passes from Johnson's Idler, through the Edinburgh Review, the Westminster Gazette, Hound and Horn, the Dial, the Athenaeum, the Criterion, Horizon, and - finally, perhaps - Encounter - is practically at an end. Hazlitt and Lamb would have few opportunities to publish their essays nowadays. This conference seeks to remedy this neglect, bringing together academics, novelists, and essayists, creating an opportunity for ideas to be exchanged, stimulated, and disseminated.
Saturday July 2
9:30-11. (Chair: Michael Wood)
Hermione Lee – Dreams and Clouds: Lamb, Woolf, and the Essay
Felicity James – Charles Lamb, Elia, and the Familiar Essay
11:30-1 (Chair: Gillian Beer)
Uttara Natarajan – William Hazlitt’s Poetics of Familiarity
Adam Phillips – The Psychoanalyst and the Essay
2:00-3:30 (Chair: Robert-Louis Abrahamson)
Stefano Evangelista – Walter Pater’s Essays
Andrew O’Hagan – The Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
7-8:30 (at the London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London WC1A)
(Chair: Hermione Lee)
Jeremy Treglown – The History of the Review-Essay
Markman Ellis – Diurnal Form and ‘The Spectator’
Sunday July 3
9:30-11 (Chair: David Russell)
Katie Murphy – Bacon, the essay, and experiment
Gillian Beer – ‘Mind-Stuff’ and Science – essays by W. K. Clifford and John Tyndall
11:30-1 (Chair: Markman Ellis)
Sophie Butler – William Cornwallis and Montaigne
Ophelia Field – Legacies of the Early Eighteenth Century Essay
2-3:30 (Chair: Asiya Bulatova)
Peter Howarth – Nonchalance is good, and: Modern Poetry and the Essay
Adam Piette – The Cold War Essay
4:00-5:30 (Chair: Jeremy Treglown)
Karl Miller – Carlyle and Macaulay on Boswell
Geoff Dyer – The Novelistic Essay