| Contents |
Introduction : baseball and myth -- The myth of the gap -- August Wilson's Fences and the art of bricolage -- Paths of glory : baseball, key narratives, and the monomyth -- Mark Harris's Bang the drum slowly and the two stories -- Dimensions of the field of play -- Going back to the mother-land : W. P. Kinsella's The Iowa baseball confederacy and William Kennedy's Ironweed -- At play on the fields of the gods : baseball, conversion, and crisis art -- Ecstasy and art in Eric Rolfe Greenberg's The celebrant -- Bernard Malamud's The natural in the wasteland -- Playing god, playing man : J. Henry Waugh in The house of joy -- Fathers and sons, blessings, and baseball's myth of atonement -- "Every inch a man" : the baseball dwarf -- Epilogue : the question of aesthetics : baseball, bricolage, and the beautiful. |
