Ground rules: baseball & myth

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.