Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references (pages 481-506) and index
Spellers, punsters, and spread-eagle linguistics -- Enlightened Europeans, romantic Americans: origins of our transcendental quest for the language of nature -- Parsing the language of nature -- Antebellum America goes gaga over grammar -- Copyrighting etymological ecstasy -- Thoreau and the life of words -- The ironic drift in Antebellum language philosophy -- Go slow: man thinking -- Wordplay, romantic irony, and the forms of Antebellum fiction -- Savoring the wiles of words -- Whitman's experiments with language -- Thoreau and the sounds of silence -- Walden's antic dialectic between self and society -- Scatology and eschatology: the heroic dimensions of Thoreau's wordplay
