Across centuries and continents, the Irish essay has captured impressions and insights triggered by socio-political transformations across the island, and the form’s malleability has allowed writers to puzzle out the contours of Irish identity, often highlighting its deliberate performativity. Shaped by the culture’s oral tradition, the Irish essay frequently imbricates with storytelling, theatrical performance, and public lectures, live events that underscore its performative qualities. Writers often gear their impressions and inquiries self-consciously to audiences real and imagined, assuming the essay plays a meaningful role in public dialogue. In the twenty-first century, personal and lyric essays focused on rapidly changing perceptions of bodies and sexuality exemplify this trait. This alertness to performance and audiences helps to explain the Irish essay’s ready adaptation to new forms, technologies, and platforms in pursuit of readers, listeners, and viewers at home and abroad.

This chapter presents the history of essayistic writing by Latinas and Latinos in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. Latinx writers have long recognized the power of the essay for personal and polemical expression, despite the genre’s relative neglect in the literary marketplace and among critics. Encompassing work by writers who have migrated or are descended from Latin America or the Caribbean (including writers who identify as Hispanic, Chicana/o/x, Nuyorican, or Afro Latino), the Latinx essay reflects this heterogeneity, as authors have used the form for everything from personal recollection and spiritual reflection to cultural affirmation and aesthetic evaluation. However, Latinx writers often use even their most personal essays to engage social and political debates. At the same time, these authors take advantage of the essay’s dialogic nature in their explorations of contentious issues, opening a dialogue with the reader as they show their thought processes on the page. While Latinx authors blur the boundaries among different types of essays, this chapter explores three broad strands: the crónica, the personal essay, and the radical feminist essay.

The variety of immigrant experiences expressed through the essay form is the subject of this chapter, which presents a panorama of writing by US immigrants who have found unique ways to give language to an often disorienting venture. The personal essay has proven to be a powerful tool for US writers exploring what it means to be a migrant or a descendant of migrants. Social scientists tend to look at the big picture when it comes to migration, theorizing and investigating migration as the large-scale movement of people from one place to another. But every mass migration is an aggregation of individual experiences, fraught with hardship, sacrifice, and the full gamut of human emotions, from hope to despair. Personal essays about migration and its effects chart the transformations that occur when people leave one place for another. Leaving home is inevitably wrenching, and many essays about migration register a nostalgia for the place – and the life – left behind. The personal essay is a form ideally suited for capturing the motivations, achievements, and disappointments of migrants who have often come to the United States because of the promise of the nation’s democratic principles.

This chapter locates the origin of the online essay in the era of the pre-commercial Internet, when communication occurred largely over message boards, forums, and listservs. The author then charts the history of the essay, and essays by women in particular, across a variety of platforms and publications, including personal blogs, the Huffington Post, Jezebel, and BuzzFeed, before concluding with an argument for the emancipatory political potential of the personal essay.

This chapter argues that the personal essay came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century, evolving from the familiar essay favored by writers such as Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf. Prior to the twentieth century, the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but only in a deliberately circumlocutory manner. But the pressure to constitute a stable self brought to bear by academic and other institutions gave rise to a new conception of the personal essay, and to confession more generally, as a vehicle of “spectacular personhood.”