This chapter examines the British essay in the age of the Internet, a period which has radically reshaped literary culture. Online magazines and journals now outnumber their print precursors, vastly increasing the venues available to budding essayists. But this transformation was predated by a more pivotal online trend: blogging. Beginning in the early years of the new millennium, and ending, effectively, with the rise of social media, the golden age of blogging allowed a wave of self-published writers to revolutionise literary criticism and cultural theory. Free from professional aims and ambitions, experimental and avidly personal, their essays left a lasting impression on both literary journalism and the academy. This chapter explores the underacknowledged possibilities and legacies of blogging, surveying the ways in which prominent bloggers reimagined the essay form.

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

This chapter introduces the concept of reparative reading and explains the benefits of reading Sappho and Homer through a reparative lens. It argues that previous scholarship has applied a notion of intertextuality that is competitive and hierarchical, thus missing out on key elements of Sappho’s engagement with Homer. It also introduces the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a queer theorist, poet, and fiber artist and anticipates some of the parallels between Sedgwick and Sappho as reparative readers. An overview of Sedgwick’s career, her understanding of queerness and the social and historical contexts for her evolving sensibilities as a reparative reader are provided, as is a preview of the following chapters.

Wild Abandon’s conclusion contends that an identity politics of ecology is not only impossible to sustain but also politically undesirable, given its erasure of difference and its implicit nihilism – its suggestion that individuals and communities do not matter in the grand scheme of ecological change. However, the question driving the identity politics of ecology – how does one reconcile self with system? – continues to govern contemporary scholarship as well as mainstream representations of wilderness. Specifically, questions regarding the subject’s role in vital networks, its material heft or ephemerality, and the ontological and epistemological forces that center and decenter it remain the focus of scholarship in new-materialist philosophy, queer ecology, and material ecocriticism. In the process, these paradigms participate in the same circuit of ideas that gave rise to the identity politics of ecology. Keeping this point in mind, this conclusion considers how current reading practices might help or hinder environmentalist goals, and recommends that environmentalist thinking eschew the notion of authenticity altogether, in favor of a pragmatic politics of consistency.

Whitman’s work, as it is being read today, speaks to and transforms discussions in literary studies and the humanities more broadly during a time of intellectual ferment. To approach a collection of essays on “the new Whitman studies” is to begin with the problem of novelty and inheritance that Whitman himself forged into an architecture for his poetry. As digital storage and transmission platforms restoke the life of forms, the question of the next new phase of Whitman’s work, its critical and popular life and meaning, becomes urgent. And as poets, journalists, and scholarly humanists interrogate their roles in public culture, turning to new theories (or no theories) and reaching for new (often electronically accessed) audiences, the newspaperman-turned-radical-poet looms large as a figure through whom we might once again contemplate our own practices and professions.