Reimagining Thoreau

This study reconsiders Thoreau's career from his graduation from Harvard in 1837 to his death in 1862.

Robert Milder (Author)

9780521068369, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 July 2008

260 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.39 kg

"...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

Reimagining Thoreau synthesises the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's career from his graduation from Harvard in 1837 to his death in 1862. The purposes of the book are threefold: to situate Thoreau's aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to a microcosm of ante-bellum Concord; 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, to overturn traditional views of Thoreau's 'decline' by offering a new estimate of the post-Walden writing and its place within Thoreau's development.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]