Essays at Troynovant:
mining the prismatic
veins of Knowledge;
listed by Title, G-L
  

These essays range in length from squibs to complex treatments; and in style from humorous to polemical, from expository to analytical. The title or first paragraph should tell you what you're looking at, if not necessarily what you're in for.

Some entries here we label review-essays. This distinguishes contributions more substantial than regular reviews, still focusing on particular works; but, essay-like, perhaps longer, more detailed, more fully backgrounded, more analytical. As a practical matter this means basically that the contribution is given an entry in the appropriate Essays index as well as the Books or Films etc index(es).

Essays or review-essays are more likely to include significant plot spoilers than our regular reviews. If so, we assume you've read the books or seen the films discussed therein, but we do try to indicate that up front.

[ alphabetical by topic; topical persons (if any); essayist ]

  
The dawn of literature ... was bathed in the twilight of mysticism and mythology. ... But the earliest literati — priests, prophets, rhapsodes, bards — had less direct means to impress their audiences than their older colleagues, the masked and painted illusion-mongers. They had to 'dramatize' their tales, by techniques which we can only infer from hints.

The dramatization of an epic recital aims, like stage-craft from which it is derived, at creating, to some extent at least, the illusion that the events told are happening now and here. Perhaps the oldest of these techniques is the use of direct speech, to make the audience believe that it is listening not to the narrator but to the characters themselves; ...

There is hardly a novelist who had not wished at times that he were a histrion [stage-player], and could convey by direct voice, grimace, and gesture what his characters look like and feel. But writers have evolved other techniques to create the illusion that their characters are alive, and to make their audience fall in love with a heroine who exists only as printer's ink on paper. The real tears shed over Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary are the ultimate triumph of sympathetic magic.

Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation  (1964)