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The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic.Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made.Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.

Genre—the articulation of'kind'—is one of the oldest and most continuous subjects of theoretical and critical commentary. Yet from Romanticism to postmodernism, the concept of genre has been punched with so many holes that today it hardly seems graspable, let alone viable. By combining theory with dialectical literary histories of three significantly different genres—tragedy, satire, and the essay—John Snyder reconstructs genre as the figural deployment of symbolic power.One purpose of this approach is to reconcile the recent dismantling of representational and classificatory genres with the incipient notion in post-Althusser Marxism that genre is the crucial mediation between history and aesthetics. Snyder extends certain implications of Aristotle, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Serres. He also offers the first antisystem yet comprehensive genre theory to serve as a fully distinct alternate to Frye's formalist and Genette's structuralist schemes.Finally, Snyder's theory of genre as power opens a way to a fundamentally new theory of literature itself: that aesthetic language deployed as power organizes itself as generic intervention. Three historically dynamic configurations establish the range of all possible genres—tragedy as power politically deployed as mimesis, satire as power rationally deployed as rhetoric, and the essay as power textually deployed as constative rhetoric.Specific analyses developing this important new theory cover a broad spectrum of literature, from classical to contemporary. Other genres, different media, and a variety of subgenres and modes political and religious—all acquire fresh significance from the elaborations of Snyder's three selected genres.

The novel-essay emerged in France, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and reached its highest formal complexity in Austria and Germany, during the interwar period. Here, Ercolino argues that it is crucial for a renovated understating of the history of the novel in modernity.

Rooted in close reading of texts, including the essays of E.B. White, this comprehensive assessment of the oft-slighted subform of the literary essay situates the familiar at the heart of the essay as form.

Nicht der von der Forschung viel beachtete Roman'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften', sondern Musils Essays stehen im Mittelpunkt dieser innovativen Untersuchung, die Essayismus nicht als Textmerkmal, sondern als metatextuelles Vertextungsverfahren bestimmt. Als Medien kultureller Selbstreflexion sind Musils bedeutende Essays Kulturkritik und Poetologie der Moderne zugleich. Die vorliegende Studie entwickelt in der Verbindung von Literatur- und Soziologiegeschichte, Texttheorie und Gattungspoetik neue Analysekriterien zur Bestimmung des Essayistischen. Im Vergleich mit Texten von Georg Simmel, Georg Lukács, Béla Balázs, Franz Blei und Hermann Broch werden die für den essayistischen Metatext grundlegenden Verfahren der Verkettung, Kommentierung, Fortschreibung, Inkorporierung und Traversion aufgezeigt. Essayismus als literaturwissenschaftliche Beschreibungs- bzw. Analysekategorie bezeichnet hier ein Autornamen, Einzeltexte, Gattungen wie Diskurse überschreitendes, anschlussfähiges Vertextungsprinzip.