This study focuses on the co-evolution of the essay and the mode of literacy it enabled, and the interactive processes of reading, with a new approach to early modern textuality. It shows how the genre served to record, test and disseminate the skills required; and how the essay was adopted as a mechanism by various intellectual disciplines.

' offers a splendid tool to scholars interested in early modern readers.' David Ainsworth, Journal of British Studies

'Scott Black's Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain is a little gem... His style induces thoughtful reflection, clearing the mind wonderfully. It should be recommended to anyone who wants to write essays.' - Lesley Coote, The Year's Work in English Studies

'...a timely and compelling exercise in criticism.' - David Hill Radcliffe, Eighteenth-Century Life

'An important addition to genre studies...Often rising to aphoristic beauty, the book is written as a "thinking through", an unsystematic probing across a hundred and fifty years of the functions and adaptations of a genre that is, as Black convincingly portrays it, always a catalyst to further reading and writing, the site of mutual promptings between writers and readers over time.' - Adam Potkay, SEL

'This book combines a sensitivity to present day theories of reading with an awareness of the historical context. Scott Black is also innovative in his aim of relating changing print culture to generic change, and in focusing on a neglected genre such as the essay, whose very ubiquity seems to render it invisible to many.' - Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Autorentext
SCOTT BLACK teaches English at the University of Utah, USA. This is his first book, but he has published articles previously in journals such as Eighteenth Century Fiction and Eighteenth Century Studies .

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE: OF ESSAYS Draughts of Reading By Way of Essays PART TWO: ESSAY EXAPTED Boyle's Essay Social and Literary Form in the Spectator Fleeting Habitations in Tom Jones Appendices Notes Bibliography Index