Essay in the context of Columnist

Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment. It can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.

Literary criticism is one of the oldest academic disciplines, and is concerned with the literary merit or intellectual significance of specific texts. The study of books and other texts as artifacts or traditions is instead encompassed by textual criticism or the history of the book. "Literature", as an art form, is sometimes used synonymously with literary fiction, fiction written with the goal of artistic merit, but can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography, diaries, memoirs, letters, and essays. Within this broader definition, literature includes non-fictional books, articles, or other written information on a particular subject.

A writer is a person who uses written words in different writing styles, genres, and techniques to communicate ideas, to inspire feelings and emotions, or to entertain. Writers may develop different forms of writing such as novels, short stories, monographs, travelogues, plays, screenplays, teleplays, songs, and essays as well as reports, educational material, and news articles that may be of interest to the general public. Writers' works are nowadays published across a wide range of media. Skilled writers who are able to use language to express ideas well often contribute significantly to the cultural content of a society.

The term "writer" is also used elsewhere in the arts and music, such as songwriter or a screenwriter, but also a stand-alone "writer" typically refers to the creation of written language. Some writers work from an oral tradition.

Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931, and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often used as a companion piece, or inversion counterpart to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

In 1998 and 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 on its list of the 100 Best Novels in English of the 20th century. In 2003, Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", and the novel was listed at number 87 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged since its original publication. It has landed on the American Library Association list of top 100 banned and challenged books of the decade since the association began the list in 1990.

The Rebel (French: L'Homme révolté) is a 1951 book-length essay by Albert Camus, which treats both the metaphysical and the historical development of rebellion and revolution in societies, especially Western Europe.

Examining both rebellion and revolt, which may be seen as the same phenomenon in personal and social frames, Camus examines several 'countercultural' figures and movements from the history of Western thought and art, noting the importance of each in the overall development of revolutionary thought and philosophy. He analyses the decreasing social importance of god, king and virtue and the development of nihilism. It can be seen as a sequel to The Myth of Sisyphus, where he ponders the meaning of life, because it answers the same question, but offers an alternative solution.

Literary work is a generic term for works of literature, i.e. texts such as fiction and non-fiction books, essays, screenplays.

In the philosophy of art and the field of aesthetics there is some debate about what that means, precisely.

A graphic novel is a self-contained, book-length form of sequential art. The term graphic novel is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comics scholars and industry professionals. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term comic book, which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks. It has also been described as a marketing term for comic books.

Fan historian Richard Kyle coined the term graphic novel in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha. The term gained popularity in the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978) and the start of the Marvel Graphic Novel line (1982) and became familiar to the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986, the collected editions of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1987. The Book Industry Study Group began using graphic novel as a category in book stores in 2001.

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (/ˈdaɪkstrə/ DYKE-strə; Dutch: [ˈɛtsxər ˈʋibə ˈdɛikstraː] ; 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, mathematician, and science essayist.

Born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Dijkstra studied mathematics and physics and then theoretical physics at the University of Leiden. Adriaan van Wijngaarden offered him a job as the first computer programmer in the Netherlands at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, where he worked from 1952 until 1962. He formulated and solved the shortest path problem in 1956, and in 1960 developed the first compiler for the programming language ALGOL 60 in conjunction with colleague Jaap A. Zonneveld. In 1962 he moved to Eindhoven, and later to Nuenen, where he became a professor in the Mathematics Department at the Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven. In the late 1960s he built the THE multiprogramming system, which influenced the designs of subsequent systems through its use of software-based paged virtual memory. Dijkstra joined Burroughs Corporation as its sole research fellow in August 1973. The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the "EWD" series, most of them technical reports, for private circulation within a select group.

A time limit or deadline is a fixed point in time or a bounded time interval, by which a task or objective must be completed. Once that time has passed, the item may be considered overdue (for example, a work project or school assignment). In a professional context, missing a deadline can negatively affect an employee's performance evaluation, while in education, late submissions such as essays or reports may result in grade deductions.

In some cases, no materials can be submitted after the deadline. Examples include calls for proposal, commercial tenders for bids, the handling of court cases, and application dates for universities and professional schools. For tests and examinations in schools, universities and job competitions, once the time limit for the test is up, the test-takers must put down their pens or pencils and hand in their test.

Enrico Corradini (20 July 1865 – 10 December 1931) was an Italian novelist, essayist, journalist and nationalist political figure.

"Resistance to Civil Government", also called "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" or "Civil Disobedience", is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should prioritize their conscience over compliance with unjust laws, asserting that passive submission to government authority enables injustice. Thoreau was motivated by his opposition to slavery and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), which he viewed as morally and politically objectionable.

The essay has had a significant impact on political thought and activism, influencing figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, who adopted its principles in the struggle for Indian independence, and Martin Luther King Jr., who cited it as a key influence during the American civil rights movement. Its themes of individual responsibility and resistance to injustice have made it a foundational text in the philosophy of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.

"Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (German: Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?), often referred to simply as "What Is Enlightenment?", is a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. In the December 1784 publication of the Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly), edited by Friedrich Gedike and Johann Erich Biester, Kant replied to the question posed a year earlier by the Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner [de], who was also an official in the Prussian government. Zöllner's question was addressed to a broad intellectual public community, in reply to Biester's essay titled "Proposal, not to engage the clergy any longer when marriages are conducted" (April 1783). A number of leading intellectuals replied with essays, of which Kant's is the most famous and has had the most impact. Kant's opening paragraph of the essay is a much-cited definition of a lack of enlightenment as people's inability to think for themselves due not to their lack of intellect, but lack of courage.

The term composition (from Latin com- "with" and ponere "to place") as it refers to writing, can describe authors' decisions about, processes for designing, and sometimes the final product of, a composed linguistic work. In original use, it tended to describe practices concerning the development of oratorical performances, and eventually essays, narratives, or genres of imaginative literature, but since the mid-20th century emergence of the field of composition studies, its use has broadened to apply to any composed work: print or digital, alphanumeric or multimodal. As such, the composition of linguistic works goes beyond the exclusivity of written and oral documents to visual and digital arenas.

Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal (German: [ˈhuːɡo fɔn ˈhoːfmanstaːl] ; 1 February 1874 – 15 July 1929) was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.

Restoration literature is the English literature written during the historical period commonly referred to as the English Restoration (1660–1688), which corresponds to the last years of Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogeneous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news becoming a commodity, the essay developing into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual criticism.

The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention, and they differ markedly from genre to genre. Thus, the "Restoration" in drama may last until 1700, while in poetry it may last only until 1666 (see 1666 in poetry) and the annus mirabilis; and in prose it might end in 1688, with the increasing tensions over succession and the corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or not until 1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilized. In general, scholars use the term "Restoration" to denote the literature that began and flourished under Charles II, whether that literature was the laudatory ode that gained a new life with restored aristocracy, the eschatological literature that showed an increasing despair among Puritans, or the literature of rapid communication and trade that followed in the wake of England's mercantile empire.

Alexandre Dumas (born Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French novelist and playwright.

His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Since the early 20th century, his novels have been adapted into nearly 200 films. Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first. He wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books; his published works totalled 100,000 pages. In the 1840s, Dumas founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris.

A video essay is an essay presented in the format of a video recording or short film rather than a conventional piece of writing; the form often overlaps with other forms of video entertainment on online platforms such as YouTube. A video essay allows an author to directly quote from film, video games, music, or other digital media, which is impossible with traditional writing. While many video essays are intended for entertainment, they can also have an academic or political purpose. This type of content is often described as educational entertainment.