Reimagining Thoreau

Reimagining Thoreau synthesises the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau’s career from his graduation from Harvard in 1837 to his death in 1862. The purposes of the book are threefold: to situate Thoreau’s aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to a microcosm of ante-bellum Concord; 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, to overturn traditional views of Thoreau’s ‘decline’ by offering a new estimate of the post-Walden writing and its place within Thoreau’s development.

• Most comprehensive literary/biographical treatment of Thoreau’s writings since Sherman Paul’s The Shores of America (1958) • Most detailed interpretation to date of the genesis and changing emphases of Walden, based on successive drafts of the manuscript • Uniquely incorporates Faith in a Seed in revaluation of the later writings • Examines in detail Thoreau’s relationship with Emerson, suggests affinities with Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson

Part I. 1837–1849: 1. ‘A False Position in Society’; 2. ‘Under the Eyelids of Time’: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Part II. 1845–54: 1. Disconstructing Walden; 2. Walden and the Rhetoric of Ascent; 3. Interregnum (1849–52); 4. Defying Gravity; Part III. 1854–62: 1. ‘A Point of Interest Somewhere Between’ (1854–57); 2. ‘Annexing New Territories’ (1857–62).