Reimagining Thoreau

by Robert Milder

Overview

Reimagining Thoreau synthesizes the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's literary career. The aims of the book are, first, to situate Thoreau's aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to the microcosm of antebellum Concord; second, to reinterpret Walden as a temporally layered text in light of the successive drafts of the book and the evidence of Thoreau's journals and contemporaneous writings; and third, to overturn traditional views of Thoreau's "decline" by offering a new estimate of the post-Walden writing and its place within his development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521068369
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/10/2008
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #85
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

Part I. 1837–49: 1. 'A false position in society'; 2. 'Under the eyelids of time': A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Part II. 1845–54: 3. Disconstructing Walden; 4. Walden and the rhetoric of ascent; 5. Interregnum (1849–52); 6. Defying gravity; Part III. 1854–62: 7. 'A point of interest somewhere between' (1854–7); 8. 'Annexing new territories' (1857–62); Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...his analysis is often compelling....Valuable as psychosocial literary history for the intricate record it traces, for the discontinuities it exposes in Thoreau's self-constructions, and especially for the temporal layering it describes in Walden..." ESQ

From the Publisher