Reading Essays : An Invitation.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Texts -- Essaying to Be: On Reading (and Writing) Essays -- The Advent of Personality and the Beginning of the Essay: Montaigne and Bacon -- "The Passionate Discourse of an Amateur": John Dryden's Prose and Poetic Essays -- With Wit Enough to Manage Judgment: Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism -- It's Not an Essay: Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and the Immodesty of Satire -- Turning Inside Out: Samuel Johnson's "The Solitude of the Country" -- An Allegory of Essaying? Process and Product inWilliam Hazlitt's "On Going a Journey" -- The Risk of Not Being: RalphWaldo Emerson's "Illusions" -- Forging in the Smithy of the Mind: Henry David Thoreau's "Walking" and the Problematic of Transcendence -- Estranging the Familiar: Alice Meynell's "Solitudes" -- By Indirections Find Directions Out": Hilaire Belloc's "The Mowing of a Field" -- Essaying and the Strain of Incarnational Thinking: G. K. Chesterton's "A Piece of Chalk" -- Homage to the Common Reader: Or How Should One Read Virginia Woolf 's "The Death of the Moth"? -- The Turning of the Essay: T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" -- A Site to Behold: Richard Selzer's "A Worm from My Notebook" -- The Discarnate Word: Scott Russell Sanders's "Silence" -- "Love Came to Us Incarnate": Annie Dillard's "God in the Doorway" -- A Free Intelligence": George Orwell, the Essay, and "Reflections on Gandhi" -- Where "Trifles Rule Like Tyrants": Cynthia Ozick's "The Seam of the Snail" -- Essaying and Pen Passion: Anne Fadiman as Common Reader in "Eternal Ink" -- Acts of Simplifying: Sense and Sentences in Sam Pickering's "Composing a Life" -- Caged Lions and Sustained Sibilants: E. B. White as "Recording Secretary" in "The Ring of Time".

Her Oyster Knife Sharpened: Control of Tone in Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" -- The Basic Ingredient: Candor and Compassion in Nancy Mairs's "On Being a Cripple" -- The Work of the Sympathetic Imagination: James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" -- "On a Line Between Two Sturdy Poles": Edward Hoagland's "What I Think, What I Am" -- A Note on Writing the Essay: The Issue of Process versus Product (with an essay by Cara McConnell) -- Works Cited.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.