BOOK ONE: FROM EMERSON TO THOREAU
I. IN THE OPTATIVE MOOD 3
1. Consciousness 5
2. Eloquence 14
3. Expression 24
4. The Word One with the Thing 30
5. ‘The light of the body is the eye’ 44
6. A Few Herbs and Apples 55
7. The Flowing 64
8. Self-Portrait of Saadi 71
II. THE ACTUAL GLORY 76
1. Expected Unexpectedness 76
2. What Music Shall We Have? 83
3. Thinking in Images 92
III. THE METAPHYSICAL STRAIN 100
1. Man Thinking 100
2. The Mingling of Walden and Ganges 113
3. Ishmael's Loom of Time 119
IV. THE ORGANIC PRINCIPLE 133
1. From Coleridge to Emerson 133
2. Horatio Greenough 140
3. Thoreau 153
4. New England Landscapes 157
5. Walden: Craftsmanship vs. Technique 166
BOOK TWO: HAWTHORNE
V. THE VISION OF EVIL 179
VI. PROBLEM OF THE ARTIST AS NEW ENGLANDER 192
1. Starting Point 192
2. The First Tales 202
3. ‘To open an intercourse with the world’ 219
4. The Haunted Mind 229
VII. ALLEGORY AND SYMBOLISM 242
Theory 242
1. The American Bias and Background 242
2. The Imagination as Mirror 253
3. The Crucial Definition of Romance 264
Practice 271
1. The Scarlet Letter 275
2. From ‘Young Goodman Brown’ to ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ 282
3. Hawthorne and James 292
4. Hawthorne and Milton 305
Coda 313
VIII. A DARK NECESSITY 316
1. Hawthorne's Politics, with the Economic Structure of The Seven Gables 316
2. Hawthorne's Psychology: The Acceptance of Good and Evil 337
3. From Hawthorne to James to Eliot 351
BOOK THREE: MELVILLE
IX. MOMENT OF TRANSITION 371
1. ‘Out of unhandselled savage nature’ 371
2. Mardi: A Source-Book for Plenitude 377
3. Autobiography and Art 390
X. THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY 396
1. The Economic Factor 396
2. ‘The world's a ship on its passage out’ 402
3. Structure 409
4. ‘A bold and nervous lofty language’ 421
5. The Matching of the<