The Hybrid Essay in Europe in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

This paper focuses on narrative hybridization within the genre of the essay. The comparative corpus draws on three highly illustrative essays from English, French and Italian literature at the turn of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century: Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (1890), Marcel Proust’s Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide (1907), and Renato Serra’s Ringraziamento a una ballata di Paul Fort (1914). My thesis is that these hybrid essays represent a new intellectual critique of bourgeois individualism during the crisis of modern Europe from the Great Depression of 1873-1896 up to the First World War. Nevertheless, their narrative frames do not lay the groundwork for a new literary genre, oriented either philosophically or narratively. Rather, the introduction of a narrative framework within the essay aims at protecting the essayist and the individual from a collapse into the external narrative of history.