Reimagining Thoreau

ISBN-13: 9780521461498 / Angielski / Twarda / 1995 / 258 str.

Robert Milder; Albert Gelpi; Ross Posnock

Opis

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.

Recenzje

"...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

Spis treści

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.