Forms of the Chronotope of Thoreau’s Cape Cod

Abstract

Cape Cod is Thoreau’s fourth and last full-length book. Though he did not live long enough to see it in print (it was published posthumously in 1865), Thoreau kept on working on it until literally his last months. Just as he did on Walden. The work on the two books often overlapped in the course of the extremely intense last decade of Thoreau’s life, when the equation of Life with Art was not only the perfect mode of being for Thoreau, but when living had already been ‘simplified’ to writing – and writing to living – to such an extent, that the end of writing could only come – as it did – with the end of the writer’s life.