List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing

By Robert E. Belknap

Book Overview

A literary critic lovingly explores the ancient practice of list-making in literature "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 beautifully written book is the first to examine literary lists and the remarkably wide range of ways writers use them. Robert Belknap first examines lists through the centuries--from Sumerian account tablets and Homer's catalogue of ships to Tom Sawyer's earnings from his fence-painting scheme--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 that lists offer.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300103832
• ISBN13: 9780300103830
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

SUPER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After reading Leaves of Grass, Mobey-Dick, Walden, and Emerson's essays and letting them burn on my heart for ten years, I read THE LIST BY ROBERT E. BELKNAP and it altered my perspective on these previously read books. This book is amazing and is by far the best I have ever read! It is extremely beneficial to adding to your IQ. Happy reading! :)

BEST BOOK EVER

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AMAZING

This book is the finest, most enthralling piece of literature ever written in the English language...it is truly inspirational.

The man himself

I have the extreme fortune of knowing this radiant scholar. He is an amazing intellectual, and it is no surprise that his book is so stimulating. He is a brilliant man, and his book should not be passed up.