Laying out land: Land surveying and space configurations in Henry D. Thoreau's 'Walden', 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers', the journal and 'Walking'

The premise of this dissertation is that one of the main themes of antebellum America which Henry D. Thoreau chronicles, the transformation of land into landscape, is a transformation that is a cause and an effect of different, yet related, cultural, economic, and political trends. Reading Thoreau's experiment in living, farming, and self-discovery at Walden Pond as a response to Transcendentalism's tenets of individual freedom, self-reliance, self-development, and social progress, this study demonstrates that land surveying is a precondition for claiming land-ownership as well as for planting and cultivating a new individual. Thoreau's land surveys recapitulate the sentiment that makes cultivating one's garden (diligence, self-reliance, property, and propriety) a moral imperative that transforms the landscape from "pasture for imagination" into the ground against which the American Self is measured and inscribed.;Far from being a mere accident in Thoreau's life, the profession of land surveyor is a prerequisite and a foundation for his ideal practice in and study of nature. Both a lucrative business enterprise and a draft toward published work, land surveying is to Thoreau what the lecture circuit had been to Emerson. Contributing to recent scholarship analyzing the importance of land surveying to literary studies, this study shows that Thoreau's interest and expertise in the "map genre" challenge both the nineteenth-century's and the present day's celebratory rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. Invariably told as a typological saga of the planting of a city on a hill or as a cautionary tale of conquest and plunder, only recently has the settling of America been recast as a case study of how the scientific knowledge of map making and land surveying, rather than religious, political, cultural, or economic determinism, led to the creation of a new nation. Writing during the time when transcendentalists, natural historians, and politicians were fiercely debating the prospects of the young republic by grounding its identity under the auspices of a generic "nature's nation," Thoreau creates a literary landscape that documents territorial expansion within the confines of his native village by means of land surveying.