Reimagining Thoreau

Capa
Cambridge University Press, 31/03/1995 - 237 páginas
Reimagining Thoreau is a major reconsideration of Thoreau's career from his graduation from Harvard in 1837 to his death in 1862. Combining biographical and manuscript evidence with a fresh reading of nearly all of Thoreau's texts, Robert Milder focuses on the drama of psychosocial adjustment occurring within and beneath the written work. Rooted in the microcosm of ante-bellum Concord but also in the private urgencies of his nature, Thoreau's writings, in Milder's view, are rhetorical efforts to mediate his troubled relations with his fellow townsmen and to inscribe and thereby realize an ideal self. At the center of Reimagining Thoreau is the first detailed interpretation of Walden as a temporally layered text that changed as Thoreau himself changed during the years of composition and whose shifts and discontinuities suggest a subtler, more conflicted story than the myth of triumph Thoreau deliberately shaped. Milder also looks beyond Walden to counter the traditional view of Thoreau's "decline". His discussion of the late natural-history essays is not only one of the fullest we have; it completes Milder's reconfiguration of Thoreau's career, which is neither a parabola whose vertex is Walden nor a continuous line, but a rising arc with periodic disruptions and recommencements, constant only in its impulse toward ascent.
 

Índice

18371849
4
Disconstructing Walden
49
Walden and the Rhetoric of Ascent
57
Interregnum 18491852
101
Defying Gravity 18521854
119
3
205
18541862
217
Annexing New Territories 18571862
227
Index
233
Direitos de autor

Outras edições - Ver tudo

Palavras e frases frequentes

Informação bibliográfica