Edwards, Sarah Bethany; (2025) The Post-Internet Essay: Aesthetics and Form in Feminism’s Fourth Wave. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Human thought and writing today are often intertwined with digital media and the internet. In response, literary critics have developed post-digital and post-internet understandings of how literary forms and genres have co-evolved alongside technology; however, little has been written about the essay. Addressing this scholarly silence, this thesis identifies an emerging canon of feminist essayists that formally invite the internet into their writing. Given the potentially exponentially expansive nature of a project exploring the essay, the internet, and contemporary feminism, this study focuses on North American writers producing ‘Lyric’, ‘Viral’, ‘Anxious’, and ‘Hip-Hop’ blog essays. These genres open out onto different facets of the essay’s history and discourse, including issues relating to form, rhetoric, readership, and marketability. Notably, this dissertation does not attempt to recreate the exciting work exploring earlier essayists such as Michel de Montaigne and William Hazlitt or their influence on contemporary essayists. Instead, it focuses on the features of contemporary feminist post-internet essays to develop writing about the feminist essay now. It takes a long view of the essay and a paradoxically long view of the present to identify the emergence of a feminist post-internet canon, and its forms and aesthetics, as it maps for the first time where the essay went next in response to changing technologies, textual materialities, and political landscapes. By focusing on contemporary feminist essays, this project demonstrates how post-internet essays not only contribute to the feminist fourth wave (circa 2008-present) but also illuminate how it has a significant literary component rather than being a strictly online or digital movement. In the process, it contributes new literary and analytical depth to commentaries on fourth-wave feminism, archives born-digital women’s writing that might otherwise be dismissed as minor or ephemeral and explores how feminist essayists create spaces for experimentation with different modes of intellectual, affective, or aesthetic engagement.

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