The List
Subtitle: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: October 11, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780300103830
Subjects: Literary studies: general; Language Arts & Disciplines; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; Language; USA; General; Literary Criticism & Collections / General; Library & Information Science; 19th century; American literature; Catalogs in literature; Emerson, Ralph Waldo,; History and criticism; Lists in literature
Description: ""I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house," wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. In creating this list, and many others that appear in his writings, Thoreau was working within a little-recognized yet ancient literary tradition: the practice of listing or cataloguing. This book is the first to examine literary lists and the remarkable wide range of ways writers use them." "Robert Belknap begins by examining lists through the centuries - from Sumerian account tablets and Homer's catalogue of ships to Tom Sawyer's earnings from his fence-painting scheme - and then focuses on lists in the works of four American Renaissance authors: Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau. Lists serve a variety of functions in Emerson's essays, Whitman's poems, Melville's novels, and Thoreau's memoirs, and Belknap discusses their surprising variety of pattern, intention, scope, art, and even philosophy. In addition to guiding the reader through the list's many uses, this book explores the pleasures they offer."--BOOK JACKET.