Thoreau\u27s Critique of the American Pastoral in \u3ci\u3eA Week\u3c/i\u3e

This essay questions a critical consensus about Thoreau\u27s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as a pastoral elegy for his brother and best friend, John. Reading A Week from a geographical perspective, this essay argues that Thoreau anticipated professional geographers by eighty years in conducting a dynamic analysis of the transformation of New England\u27s landscape. Thoreau re-creates through description and narration the appearance and disappearance of the pastoral, the Native-American, and the industrialized landscape along the two rivers. Presenting these landscapes in dynamic interrelation with one another against the backdrop of New England\u27s still wild nature, Thoreau historicizes New England\u27s changing topography and thereby criticizes the American pastoral myth about a timeless golden age of the New English Canaan. This reading encourages us to regard Thoreau not only as a private literary artist but also as a scientist and social satirist. This essay also reveals Thoreau\u27s geographic imagination, an important aspect of his mind that has been overlooked so far by Thoreau critics and the general reading public alike