A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 12 pages of analysis & critique of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 12 pages of analysis & critique of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
This section contains 3,111 words
(approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Stephen Adams

SOURCE: Adams, Stephen. “The Genres of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” In Approaches to Teaching Thoreau's Walden and Other Works, edited by Richard J. Schneider, pp. 143‐9. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1996.

In the following essay, Adams explains the teaching opportunities that arise from exploring the question of A Week's genre.

The “drama” of Sunday in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers concludes “without regard to any unities which we mortals prize. Whether it might have proved tragedy, or comedy, or tragi‐comedy, or pastoral, we cannot tell” (114). Many readers have shared a like uncertainty about A Week as a whole and have based criticisms of it on dubious assumptions about its genre. For example, James Russell Lowell was the first to berate what he called the work's digressions: “[T]hey are out of proportion and out of place...

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This section contains 3,111 words
(approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Stephen Adams
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Critical Essay by Stephen Adams from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.