| Summary: | <p>This thesis argues that the geopolitical crises of the middle to late twentieth century catalysed the emergence of a literary practice I call ‘long-form essayism’.</p>
<p>The literary essay has long stood accused of being secondary or ancillary, next to more established genres like poetry or the novel. In recent years, however, the rise of hybrid categories like essayistic fiction and creative nonfiction, in concomitance with renewed debates concerning the novel’s viability, has led to growing interest in the essay form. My thesis makes an intervention in the ongoing revival of essay scholarship by showing how essayistic form offered a rich repertoire of technical resources in the service of writers anxious to confront the violence of the Second World War—whether anticipated, lived, or remembered—without resorting to the descriptive capabilities of fiction alone. Neither short nor minor, the book-length essays in my thesis revive older, supposedly outmoded genres of writing—among them, the philosophical dialogue, the commonplace book, the spoof encyclopaedia, the aphorism, the ramble—which can be placed under the main rubric of literary essayism. This loose body of writing, I contend, emerged in the last years of the interwar as a formal riposte to the looming violence of war, and has since then solidified into a highly inventive and formally exuberant model for writing historical crisis, especially at the scale and pace of long-form prose.</p>
<p>My thesis is organized in two parts. Part One focuses on three works written during the Second World War, namely Rebecca West’s <em>Black Lamb and Grey Falcon</em>, Cyril Connolly’s <em>The Unquiet Grave</em>, and Alberto Savinio’s <em>Nuova enciclopedia</em>. Part Two moves to the end of the century, from the 1980s to the 1990s, so as to investigate the twin experiments with essayistic form in Claudio Magris’s Danube and W.G. Sebald’s <em>The Rings of Saturn</em>.</p>
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