The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau

This is an accessible guide to reading and understanding the works of Thoreau.

Joel Myerson (Edited by)

9780521440370, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 June 1995

248 pages
23.7 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

"...this volume works splendidly well both for beginning students and for seasoned Thoreauvians, several of the most distinguished being among Myerson's contributors." Nineteenth-Century Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau is intended as an accessible guide to reading and understanding the works of Thoreau. Presenting essays by a distinguished array of contributors, the Companion is a valuable resource for historical and contextual material, whether on early writings like A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, on the monumental Walden, or on his assorted journals and later books. It also serves in some ways as a biographical guide, offering new insights into his turbulent publishing career, and his brief but extraordinarily original life. In short, the Companion helps the reader come to Thoreau's writings, as he would say, 'deliberately and reservedly' by suggesting how Thoreau uses language, how his biography informs his writing, how personal and historical influences shaped his career, and how his writings function as literary works.

1. Thoreau's reputation Walter Harding
2. Thoreau and Concord Robert D. Richardson, Jr
3. Thoreau and Emerson Robert Sattelmeyer
4. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Linck C. Johnson
5. Thoreau as poet Elizabeth Hall Wetherell
6. Thoreau and his audience Steven Fink
7.Walden Richard J. Schneider
8. Thoreau in his journal Leonard N. Neufeldt
9. The Maine Woods Joseph J. Moldenhauer
10. 'A Wild Rank Place': Thoreau's Cape Cod Philip F. Gura
11. Thoreau's later natural history writings Ronald Wesley Hoag
12. Thoreau and the natural environment Lawrence Buell
13. Thoreau and reform Len Gougeon
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]