SOURCE: Adams, Stephen. “The Genres of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” In Approaches to Teaching Thoreau's Walden and Other Works, edited by Richard J. Schneider, pp. 143‐9. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1996.

In the following essay, Adams explains the teaching opportunities that arise from exploring the question of A Week's genre.

The “drama” of Sunday in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers concludes “without regard to any unities which we mortals prize. Whether it might have proved tragedy, or comedy, or tragi‐comedy, or pastoral, we cannot tell” (114). Many readers have shared a like uncertainty about A Week as a whole and have based criticisms of it on dubious assumptions about its genre. For example, James Russell Lowell was the first to berate what he called the work's digressions: “[T]hey are out of proportion and out of place...