The Guardian heralds the wonder that is an essay.
From the piece...
Though the essay constantly resists definition – and has never accrued a corpus of academic critical commentary like that given to, say, the novel - it is unusual among literary forms in that its birth can be traced to a single moment and a single man: Montaigne, whose Essaies first appeared in 1580, arguably heralding the birth of the modern idea of the author as subject (in both senses). The word meant, literally, an "assay", a trail or test or even "experiment". Whatever Miss Peecher may have thought, the essay has, over its history, remained a defiantly individual form, a space outside institutional authority or generic constraints.
Montaigne used the essay as an arena in which to observe his own mind at work. The great Romantic essayists – Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Carlyle – used it to assert the value of the individual human voice in a world increasingly felt to be dominated by "abstraction". For Emerson the essay was "man thinking". Wilde and Beerbohm used it to subvert conventional values, while for Orwell – whose essays in Tribune appeared under the banner "As I Please" – it embodied his own rigorous anti-authoritarianism. The essay is the ultimate outsider genre. If it is making a comeback, it may be that, in our age of information overload, there is a hunger among readers for the individual voice.
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