Thoreau's account of his 1839 boat trip is a finely crafted tapestry of travel writing, essays, and lyrical poetry. Thoreau interweaves descriptions of natural phenomena, the rural landscape, and local characters with digressions on literature and philosophy, the Native American and Puritian histories of New England, the Bhagavad Gita, the imperfections of Christianity, and many other subjects. Although it shares many of the themes in Thoreau's classic Walden, A Week on the Concord offers an alternative perspective on his analaysis of the relationship between nature and...

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, the only works Thoreau conceived and brought to conclusion as books, bear a distinctively important relation to each other and to his Journal, the document whose 24 year composition encompasses their development. In this book The author shows how these three works engage one another dialectically and how all of them participate in a larger project of the imagination.

The Last of the Mohicans is the most widely-read and internationally acclaimed of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, and has traditionally been regarded as an exciting and well-made adventure story. In recent years, however, critics have found in this classic tale of colonial warfare deeper levels of meaning. In the introduction to this volume, H. Daniel Peck studies these developments by tracking critical responses to the novel from the time of its publication in 1826 to the present day. The essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of The Last of the Mohicans from a...

The editor tracks critical responses to "The Last of the Mohicans" from the time of its publication in 1826 to the present day, while the essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of the novel from a variety of critical perspectives.