The Essay in the Career of the Contemporary English Novelist

Eve, Martin Paul (2024) The Essay in the Career of the Contemporary English Novelist. In: Gigante, Denise and Childs, Jason (eds.) The Cambridge History of the British Essay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 681-695. ISBN 9781009030373. (Submitted)

Abstract

This chapter shows how the essay plays out as a strategy in the career of the contemporary British novelist. Despite ‘the various ways in which the essay bristles against academic writing’, I argue here that the form has become deeply entwined with models of academic hierarchy and the teaching and research positions that contemporary novelists often take within universities. As this chapter demonstrates, such hierarchies also play out in the journalistic space of literary networking in which authors review each other and signal their affiliations to a wider public. In this context, the essay can also become a site of polemic controversy that can generate more heat than light. I finally also show how the essay plays a core role in bolstering the novel against other encroaching media, even when such defences may be preaching to the converted. While one might imagine, in the age of the internet, that the essay form would have declining cultural significance, I argue in this chapter, across the axes of ‘academia’, ‘controversy’, and ‘sophistication’, that the essay and its networks continue to exert a strong influence on the career of the contemporary British novelist.

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