ABSTRACT
When I read Corder’s Yonder, trying to place it, either as a literary or a rhetorical genre, as Corder expresses it, “to give it a name,” Thoreau’s Walden easily came to mind. There is something anomalous about naming a category of writing that fits Yonder and Walden. Are they memoirs? Or are they just examples of personal journals? Are they celebrations of geography and place? Are they simply compilations of somewhat thematic essays? Or again, are they just philosophical meditations in the spirit of Montaigne? What is it about both texts that make us want to think of them as literary works? I suggest that we can regard them as being all these things, and more, especially in having literary aims and purposes.
