Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau's Major Works
by Stephen Adams and Donald Ross. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1988.
Revising Mythologies examines Thoreau's life as a writer by tracing the complex development of his major works. In exploring how these works evolved overt time - from their origin as jottings in Thoreau's Journal through the stages of lecture and essay to their publication in book form - the study offers new insights into the works themselves and into the shape of his career as a thinker and writer.
The authors detail how Thoreau's various works interacted with each other as they developed. They show, for example, that his trip to Maine in 1846 and his drafting of the "Ktaadn" essay prompted him to reevaluate his earlier trip to Mt. Washington and to change significantly the focus of the second draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Ideas and vocabulary with which he had long been familiar and to which he had been intellectually and spiritually committed assumed deep personal importance in 1851-52 and prompted him to redirect and complete the Walden project, which he had been working on since 1845.
By exploring his works as texts that changed over time, Adams and Ross present a more accurate and complete picture of Thoreau's changing attitudes toward his primary concerns and of his developing rhetorical strategies. They also show for the first time how and under what pressures (such as those of the literary marketplace, of politics, of Thoreau's spiritual commitments) his major writings evolved.
Contents
University
of Minnesota
URL: http://English.cla.umn.edu/FacultyProfiles/Ross/Abstract
Please send comments to: Donald Ross
Last revised 15 November 1999
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator
and employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1999.