A Century Of English Essays An Anthology Ranging From Caxton To Rl Stevenson And The Writers Of Our Own Time

Author : Ernest Rhys
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781330514962
Total Pages : 516 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (149 download)

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Download or read book A Century of English Essays written by Ernest Rhys and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from A Century of English Essays: An Anthology Ranging From Caxton to R. L, Stevenson,& the Writers of Our Own Time This is a book of short essays which have been chosen with the full liberty the form allows, but with the special idea of illustrating life, manners, and customs, and at intervals filling in the English country background. The longer essays, especially those devoted to criticism and to literature, are put aside for another volume, as their different mode seems to require. But the development of the art in all its congenial variety has been kept in mind from the beginning; and any page in which the egoist has revealed a mood, or the gossip struck on a vein of real experience, or the wise vagabond sketched a bit of road or countryside, has been thought good enough, so long as it helped to complete the round. And any writer has been admitted who could add some more vivid touch or idiom to that personal half meditative, half colloquial style which gives this kind of writing its charm. We have generally been content to date the beginning of the essay in English from Florio's translation of Montaigne. That work appeared towards the end of Queen Elizabeth's time, in 1603, and no doubt it had the effect of setting up the form as a recognized genre in prose. But as we go back behind Florio and Montaigne, and behind Francis Bacon who has been called our 'first essayist, ' we come upon various experiments as we might call them - essays towards the essay, attempts to work that vein, discursively pertinent and richly reminiscent, out of which the essay was developed. Accordingly for a beginning the line has been carried back to the earliest point where any English prose occurs that is marked with the gossip's seal. A leaf or two of Chaucer's prose, a garrulous piece of the craftsman's delight in his work from Caxton, and one or two other detachable fragments of the same kind, may help us to realize that there was a predisposition to the essay, long before there was any conscious and repeated use of the form itself. By continuing the record in this way we have the advantage of being able to watch its relation to the whole growth in the freer art of English prose. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.