"'A Few Loose Sentences': Virginia Woolf e l’eredità metasaggistica di Montaigne"

The paper builds on the confutation of a widespread critical prejudice, that has burdened on the essay as a genre ever since its appearance, of which the paper draws a synthetic overview in its first part. This historiographical introduction preludes a more specific hypothesis about two possible reasons for this prejudice, which have been explored in Montaigne’s Essais. On the one hand, intertwined with the absence of specifically identifiable sources of Montaigne’s work, on the other the prejudice is linked to yet another absence, i.e. that of an aesthetical Manifesto on which to rely in order to posit some sort of prototype. The theoretical egress to this situation is the reliance on the pronouncements of the same essayists, that allows the inherent features of the genre emerge via a metaliterary approach. It is exactly in this perspective that the paper confronts Virginia Woolf’s The Modern Essay, as the epitome of a specific and most useful category of essays that allows authors, critics and readers to surmount the prejudice and to recognize the importance of a literary form capable of describing itself.