Introduction

• Introduction
• The Importance of recognizing genre when we read
• Nonfiction and Fiction
• The Sage versus the Wisdom Speaker
• The Prophet's Four-Part Pattern
• Twentieth-century Sages
• Emerson: Sage, Satirist, or Wisdom Speaker?
• Twentieth-Century Sage-writing and Other Forms of Nonfiction
• Some Remarks on Methodology

Chapter One. The Prophetic Pattern

I. Virtuosos of Interpretation

• Carlyle and The Act of Interpretation
• Ruskin and the Trivial
• Joan Didion and Twentieth-Century Acts of Interpretation
• John McPhee

II. Opposing the Audience

• Thoreau and Arnold
• Ruskin and Thoreau

III. The Prophet's Warning

• Carlyle, Ruskin, and Others

IV. Visionary Promises

• Thomas Carlyle
• John Ruskin
• Henry David Thoreau
• W. E. DuBois
• Matthew Arnold

Chapter Two, The Symbolical Grotesque

I. Invented Grotesques

• Carlyle's Grotesques
• The History of the Grotesque
• Ruskin's Definition of the Grotesque
• Religious Origins

II. Discovered Grotesques

• Carlyle & Murdered Children
• Arnold & Murdered Children
• Amphibious Popes, 7-Foot Hats
• Ruskin, Gold, and Death
• Lawrence's Landscape Emblems

III. 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

IV. 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

• Introduction
• Mailer: A Twentieth-Century Example

Chapter Four, The Sage as Master of Experience

• Introduction
• Ruskin's Wordpainting
• D. H. Lawrence
• Norman Mailer
• Tom Wolfe

Chapter Five, Ethos, or the Appeal to Credibility

• Introduction
• Ethos in Fiction and Nonfiction
• Techniques that Create Ethos: Introduction
• Autobiographical Reference and Ethos
• Montaigne's Intimacy with the Reader and the Sage's Ethos
• Admissions of Strength and Weakness
• Joan Didion: Strength from Weakness
• Norman Mailer