ABSTRACT
The efforts Henry David Thoreau made to create a variety of literary models of the representation of Nature are investigated in this chapter. It offers a much closer look at Thoreau’s practice of using drawings in his journal entries than has so far been provided by the scholarship and considers the ways he may have deliberately employed published and unpublished materials to reflect on the many features of writing and textuality. His critiques of political economy, offered in his major work, Walden, are connected directly to his critiques of visuality, particularly as it was imbricated, in the United States, by cadastral notions of geography. Close readings of passages from other writings of Thoreau’s, including “Ktaadn, or, the Maine Woods,” are presented to complement these investigations and to set his work within the broader realm of aesthetic debate in the antebellum period.
