Reading Essays: An Invitation Book

Preface     xi
Acknowledgments     xv
A Note on Texts     xvii
Essaying to Be: On Reading (and Writing) Essays     1
The Advent of Personality and the Beginning of the Essay: Montaigne and Bacon     18
"The Passionate Discourse of an Amateur": John Dryden's Prose and Poetic Essays     34
With Wit Enough to Manage Judgment: Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism     47
It's Not an Essay: Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and the Immodesty of Satire     55
Turning Inside Out: Samuel Johnson's "The Solitude of the Country"     62
An Allegory of Essaying? Process and Product in William Hazlitt's "On Going a Journey"     74
The Risk of Not Being: Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Illusions"     82
Forging in the Smithy of the Mind: Henry David Thoreau's "Walking" and the Problematic of Transcendence     93
Estranging the Familiar: Alice Meynell's "Solitudes"     103
"By Indirections Find Directions Out": Hilaire Belloc's "The Mowing of a Field"     110
Essaying and the Strain of Incarnational Thinking: G. K. Chesterton's "A Piece of Chalk"     121
Homage to the Common Reader: Or How Should One Read Virginia Woolf's "The Death of the Moth"?     128
The Turning of the Essay: T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"     140
ASite to Behold: Richard Selzer's "A Worm from My Notebook"     159
The Discarnate Word: Scott Russell Sanders's "Silence"     167
"Love Came to Us Incarnate": Annie Dillard's "God in the Doorway"     177
"A Free Intelligence": George Orwell, the Essay, and "Reflections on Gandhi"     181
Where "Trifles Rule Like Tyrants": Cynthia Ozick's "The Seam of the Snail"     190
Essaying and Pen Passion: Anne Fadiman as Common Reader in "Eternal Ink"     196
Acts of Simplifying: Sense and Sentences in Sam Pickering's "Composing a Life"     202
Caged Lions and Sustained Sibilants: E. B. White as "Recording Secretary" in "The Ring of Time"     210
Her Oyster Knife Sharpened: Control of Tone in Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"     220
The Basic Ingredient: Candor and Compassion in Nancy Mairs's "On Being a Cripple"     227
The Work of the Sympathetic Imagination: James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son"     237
"On a Line Between Two Sturdy Poles": Edward Hoagland's "What I Think, What I Am"     252
A Note on Writing the Essay: The Issue of Process versus Product (with an essay by Cara McConnell)     260
Works Cited     273