Essay Competitions in the Long Eighteenth Century: Writing to Win the Prize

Eighteenth-century essay competitions epitomised the tensions and contradictions that characterised the Enlightenment in general, and especially its media of communication and venues of sociability. This book is the first to provide a preliminary, and necessarily incomplete, overview of this phenomenon across national and linguistic borders, as well as cover a variety of institutional settings, from royal academies to voluntary societies to contests sponsored by various professional bodies and newspapers.

Thousands of participants in competitions across Europe and its colonies in the long eighteenth century did not only pronounce their views on the set questions. They wrote to win the prize - that is, they employed certain strategies of argumentation to appeal to juries at particular institutions and within distinct socio-political contexts. Numerous entries to the competitions await researchers in national and provincial archives: this book should, in its own way, instigate their further study.