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ToolsKarshan, Thomas (2024) The Essay and the Theme. In: The Cambridge History of the British Essay. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 291-308. ISBN 9781108746045
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This chapter explores the relationship of the adult essay with the ‘theme’, which was the name for school-essays until the mid-19th century. Themes were, mostly, short prose pieces, focussed on a moral subject which was also called a theme, written almost exclusively in Latin until English themes began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. The chapter argues that in the nineteenth century, the modern pedagogical essay emerged out of the Erasmian theme, combining many of its structures with the Baconian essay’s priority on individual experience and ideas. Meanwhile, the Romantic essayists, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt, chief among them, created the modern literary essay by carrying forward the priority the theme assigned to rhetoric over experience, while on the other hand imitating Montaigne’s play with the oratorical structures of the theme, and with its subject (also called a ‘theme’).
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 12 May 2025 14:30 |
| Last Modified: | 12 May 2025 14:30 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99246 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/9781009030373.024 |
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