WALDEN and RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT

For this Norton Critical Edition the texts of both Walden and "Resis-tance to Civil Government" are again based on their first editions The editor has incorporated all of Thoreau's additions to Walden, and these and all other emendations are now summarized in a table of textual variants. Throughout, annotations have been revised and expanded.

As a special feature, the Second Edition includes a much expanded selection from Thoreau's Journal, most of it reprinted by special arrangement with Princeton University Press from the definitive edition of his writings. Drawing upon newly available material written during Thoreau's two-year stay at Walden Pond and accompanied by the editor's essay on "The Journal and Walden," these selections represent and illuminate the entire 1845-54 period during which Thoreau wrote, rethought, and extensively revised Walden.

The selection of contemporary reviews has been expanded to include two notices of "Resistance to Civil Government" and three reviews of Walden that have come to light in recent years, among them one by Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard and another attributed to Lydia Maria Child. The Criticism section has been refocused on modern criticism written between 1941 and 1991 in order to represent influential essays written in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s as well as the diversity of recent commentary on Thoreau's two famous works Landmark essays by F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Drinnon, E. B. White, and Sherman Paul have been retained from the First Edition, while important and theoretically varied essays by Leo Marx, Stanley Cavell, Walter Benn Michaels, Barry Wood, Barbara Johnson, Robert Sattelmeyer, H. Daniel Peck, and Lawrence Buell have been added.