Notting Hill Editions Editor Lucasta Miller considers why the time is right for the re-emergence of the essay (www.nottinghilleditions.com, @NottingHillEds)
Intriguingly, it seems that the essay may tend to flower at moments of growth-spurts in the cultural history of the dissemination of the written word. As the growing influence of print separated authors even more from their writing, increasingly commodifying it in an ever wider, more arbitrary and anonymous marketplace, Montaigne asserted the voice of the author in his original experiments or "assays". The Romantic essayists of the 19th century-- Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Carlyle--wrote at a time when print culture was booming, fuelled by rising literacy and increasing commercialization. They used the essay to stand out against their enemy, "abstraction", whether in metaphysics, in ideology, or in the dehumanizing influence of market forces, the "cash nexus". As it had for Montaigne, the "I" of the essay stood up for the value of individual imagination and experience against the totalizing impulses and anonymity of modern culture.
In the hands of its best exponents - from Montaigne to James Baldwin, from Hazlitt to Hannah Arendt, from George Orwell to Susan Sontag - the essay has always been an essentially liberal and humanist form with a vigorously individual voice. Whenever the essay seems to have died, it revives once more on the margins asserting its outsider, anti-authoritarian status, whether in the subversive decadence of Wilde and Beerbohm, the modernism of Musil, or the rigorous individualism of George Orwell whose weekly essays in Tribune appeared under the banner "I write what I please".
In 1992, the late John Gross put the demise of the essay in the late twentieth century down to limited publishing formats: "the demands of journalism have pushed writers who might once have set up as essayists further and further in the direction of reportage, travel-writing, instant comment. There is less and less time and scope for the essay." While journalistic articles got shorter, scholarly monographs swelled, as academia became ever more professionalized. The two modes, once held together in the essay, had bifurcated.
At the same time, even in the last decade, the explosion of electronic media has put subjectivity under threat, perhaps more so than at any time since the invention of print. In the age of instant information, of the Babel of the blogosphere, and of twenty-four-hour tweeting, the individual voice can easily get lost, and surfing the net too often turns reading - once a leisurely, thoughtful activity - into obsessive-compulsive disorder and makes you feel you are suffering from ADHD.
Yet in this new age of anxiety, there are signs that the essay, once again, may be coming to the fore. Though not necessarily thought of as such, many prominent writers working today are essentially essayists. Far from being dead, the author - in the Montaignian sense of the writer able to put the texture of his or her own questing subjectivity into words - may still be alive and well.
Another sign of this, I hope, is the launch of Notting Hill Editions, a publishing imprint devoted to providing a forum for essayistic writing in its broadest sense, whose aim is to offer depth without length, insight without extraneous detail, and an eclectic array of authorial voices.
One last thought. In his book about 9/11, Malise Ruthven points out that "the overwhelming majority of the leaders of Islamicist movements have scientific educational backgrounds and qualifications. Their intellectual training... makes them more susceptible to monodimensional or literalist readings of scripture than their counterparts in the arts and humanities whose training requires them to approach texts multidimensionally, to explore contradictions and ambiguities."
It is exactly that ability to see things in shades of grey, to question, to adopt different viewpoints, and by extension to value the individual human being, which the essay - perhaps even the school essay - potentially fosters. Orwell clearly saw the form as a potential bulwark against fanaticism, ideology and intolerance. You probably once claimed that the dog ate it, but the essay may be more important than you ever knew.