Reimagining Thoreau

Reimagining Thoreau synthesizes the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau''s literary career. The aims of the book are first to situate Thoreau''s aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to the microcosm of antebellum Concord; second 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 third to overturn traditional views of Thoreau''s decline by offering a new estimate of the post-Walden writing and its place within his development.