Early in Thoreau's career, he became obsessed with the problem of getting to be at home in the world. This ambitious book relates that obsession to his way of fostering at-homeness: "inscribing" himself not only through words but through such occupations as the making of books, houses, and tracks in the woods. Frederick Garber reveals that a complex fable endemic in Thoreau and perceptible from his earliest major writings puts inscribing and the quest for at-homeness in terms of a search for a home of homes, a quest that Thoreau realized must be ultimately unsuccessful. Focusing on...

Frederick Garber takes up in detail several problems of the self broached in his previous book, The Autonomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans (Princeton, 1982). Using patterns in Byron's canon as models, he focuses on the relations of self-making and text-making as a central Romantic issue. For Byron and many of his contemporaries, putting a text into the world meant putting a self there along with it, and it also meant that the difficulties of establishing the one inevitably reflect the parallel difficulties in the other.

Professor Garber discusses some of Byron's key...

Frederick Garber studies in a wide range of English, French, German, and American literary texts instances of the struggle for the self's autonomy during the period preceding modernism. In tracing a pattern that changes from the unsettling of bourgeois conditions in Richardson to the collapse of that challenge in the Decadents, he demonstrates that this period is characterized by a pervasive dialectic of aloofness and association.

Originally published in 1982.

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