From Francis Bacon to Zadie Smith, British essayists have played a crucial role in defining and interrogating the idea of transatlantic essayism. Not to be confused with its American form, which has been central to the promotion of exceptionalist cultural ideology in the United States from the Puritans to the present, British transatlantic essayism came into its own in the early twentieth century. Beginning with an account of D.H. Lawrence’s essays and their critical engagement with Americanness, this chapter explores the development of transatlantic essayism in the work of key essayists for whom the Anglo-American context has been of central importance, including W.H. Auden, Christopher Hitchens, Pico Iyer, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith. What emerges is both a history of British transatlantic essayism and an account of the ways in which it continues to complicate our sense of the modern essay’s development on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

This chapter explores the relationship between the transformations in global capitalism that were taking place at the end of the twentieth century and the rise of postmodernism as, in the words of Fredric Jameson, the ‘cultural logic’ of those transformations. It examines the argument that this postmodern culture of transnational corporatism challenged modern distinctions between economics and politics, and even threatened the sovereignty of the nation-state. Taking three prominent accounts of postmodern culture (by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard) as its central focus, the chapter introduces the key theoretical categories of each and, by reading these in relation to influential literary texts from the period, examines how both theoretical and literary writing responded to and shaped the new economic and political climates of those decades.