Contents Page, Elegant Jeremiahs by George P. Landow (Cornell UP, 1986) (original) (raw)
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
III. The Prophet's Warning
IV. Visionary Promises
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