A Brian Dillon book about this literary form asks the reader to “imagine a form of writing so hard” that “to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial.” For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this literary form, whose name comes from a French word for “to attempt.” Early examples of this form in English include Francis Bacon’s “Of Ambition” and Joseph Addison’s “A Vision of Justice.”
ANSWER: essays (The Brian Dillon book is Essayism.)
[10h] Dillon’s book Essayism opens with an allusion to this Virginia Woolf essay, in which the author attempts to free the title creature from its position in a windowpane but ends up finding it “useless to do anything.”
ANSWER: “The Death of the Moth”
[10m] Dillon also devotes a section of Essayism to this emotion, which is called the “rust of the soul” in a book-length treatise on its “Anatomy” by Robert Burton.
ANSWER: melancholy [or The Anatomy of Melancholy]
<Jack Rado, British Literature>