Reimagining ThoreauCambridge University Press, 1995 M03 31 - 237 pages 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. |
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1849 manuscript American ascent audience Autumnal Tints Baker Farm beauty become Book of Concord called Concord Corr cultural divine draft early earth Economy effort Emerson Emersonian essay experience fact feel Fink genius Hawthorne heaven Henry David Thoreau Henry Thoreau Higher Laws Howarth human ideal imagination journal entry journal source late later Lawrence Buell Lebeaux lecture literary live M. H. Abrams meaning Melville Merrimack Rivers mind Moby-Dick moral natural history naturalist nature's neighbors observes passage pine poem poet Pond in Winter Press quest reader Reformer remarked rhetorical Romantic Sattelmeyer Scholar seeds sense society Solitude soul spiritual spring stance structure success symbolic teleology things Thoreau never Thoreau seems Thoreau writes thought tion townsmen Transcendental transcendentalist tropes truth Univ vision Wachusett Walden Pond walk Walk to Wachusett Week wild William Howarth winter chapters woods words wrote York youth