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.
Reviews
"...his analysis is often compelling...Valuable as psychosocial literary history for the intricate record it traces, for the discontinuities it exposes in Thoreau's self-constructions, and especially for the temporal layering it describes in Walden..." ESQ
