Introduction
- Introduction
- The Importance of recognizing genre when we read
- Nonfiction and Fiction
- The Sage versus the Wisdom Speaker
- Victorian Understanding of the Old Testament Prophets
- The Prophet's Four-Part Pattern
- Twentieth-century Sages
- Emerson: Sage, Satirist, or Wisdom Speaker?
- The Genre of the Sage
- Twentieth-Century Sage-writing and Other Forms of Nonfiction
Chapter One, The Prophetic Pattern
- Carlyle and The Act of Interpretation
- Ruskin and the Trivial
- Joan Didion and Twentieth-Century Acts of Interpretation
- John McPhee
Opposing the Audience
The Prophet's Warning
Visionary Promises
Chapter Two, The Symbolical Grotesque
Invented Grotesques
- Carlyle's Grotesques
- The History of the Grotesque
- Ruskin's Definition of the Grotesque
- Religious Origins
Discovered Grotesques
- Carlyle & Murdered Children
- Arnold & Murdered Children
- Amphibious Popes, 7-Foot Hats
- Ruskin, Gold, and Death
- Lawrence's Landscape Emblems
Definitions and Origins
- Carlyle, Midas, and Enchantment
- Ruskin's Goddess of Getting-on
- Ruskin's Narrative Grotesques
- Arnold's Barbarian, Philistine, and Populace
- Thoreau's Visionary Satire
Twentieth-Century Grotesques
- Norman Mailer & Grotesque Technology
- Joan Didion
- Tom Wolfe's Put-Together Girl
- Germaine Greer's Put-Together Girl
Chapter Three, "The Word Restored: Definition, Redefinition, and Satiric Redefinition"
Forms of Definition
- Introduction: an Example from Kingsley's Sermons
- Preacher's Definitions: Carlyle
- Simple Definition: Ruskin
- Denying Someone Else's Definition
- Corrective Definition: Arnold
- Satirical Definition: An Example from Thoreau
Definition as Theme and Technique
Chapter Four, The Sage as Master of Experience
Chapter Five, "Ethos, or the Appeal to Credibility"
- Introduction
- Ruskin's Wordpainting
- Convergences
- Techniques that Create Ethos: Introduction
- Autobiographical Reference and Ethos
- Montaigne's Intimacy with the Reader and the Sage's Ethos
Autobiographical Reference and Ethos
Last modified 2000