Includes bibliographical references (pages 155-168) and index.

At his death in 1862, Henry Thoreau left the major part of his writings unpublished, including 47 manuscript volumes of the Journal he kept for 24 years. Although the Journal has been acknowledged to be central to Thoreau's canon, criticism of it has been peripheral until now. In this book, the author argues that ten years before his death Thoreau came to see the Journal as an autonomous composition-in competition with Walden -and that it was a viable work in its own right. Examining the crossed and contradictory imperative of Thoreau's discourse, she opens up the Journal to public scrutiny--moving from questions of linguistic strategies and issues of the Journal's presumptive audience, to the matter of how the academy might deal with the material. She concludes that although the Journal is Thoreau's private work it is also his primary work and as such it should take precedence over the books Thoreau published in his lifetime.

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