"Trees were central to Henry David Thoreau's creativity as a writer, his work as a naturalist, his thought and his inner life. His portraits of them were so perfect, it was as if he could to see the ...sap flowing beneath their bark. When Thoreau wrote that the poet loves the pine tree as his own shadow in the air, he was speaking about himself. In short, he spoke their language. In this original book, Richard Higgins explores Thoreau's deep connections to trees: his keen perception of them, the joy they gave him, the poetry he saw in them, his philosophical view of them, and how they fed his soul. His lively essays show that trees were a thread connecting all parts of Thoreau's being...heart, mind and spirit. Included are one hundred excerpts from Thoreau's writing about trees, paired with sixty-eight of the author's photographs. Thoreau's words are as vivid now as they were in 1890, when an English naturalist wrote that he was unusually able to 'to preserve the flashing forest colors in unfading light.' Thoreau and the Language of Trees shows that Thoreau, with uncanny foresight, believed trees were essential to the preservation of the world"
Recent Thoreau studies have shifted to an emphasis on the green" Thoreau, on Thoreau the environmentalist, rooted firmly in particular places and interacting with particular objects. In the wake of ...Buell'sEnvironmental Imagination,the nineteen essayists in this challenging volume address the central questions in Thoreau studies today: how "green," how immersed in a sense of place, was Thoreau really, and how has this sense of place affected the tradition of nature writing in America?
The contributors to this stimulating collection address the ways in which Thoreau and his successors attempt to cope with the basic epistemological split between perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature; related discussions involve the kinds of discourse most effective for writing about place. They focus on the impact on Thoreau and his successors of culturally constructed assumptions deriving from science, politics, race, gender, history, and literary conventions. Finally, they explore the implications surrounding a writer's appropriation or even exploitation of places and objects.
In his 1862 eulogy for Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflected that his friend "dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills, and waters of his native town, that he made ...them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea." Finding Thoreau traces the reception of Thoreau's work from the time of his death to his ascendancy as an environmental icon in the 1970s, revealing insights into American culture's conception of the environment.
Moving decade by decade through this period, Richard W. Judd unveils a cache of commentary from intellectuals, critics, and journalists to demonstrate the dynamism in the idea of nature, as Americans defined and redefined the organic world around them amidst shifting intellectual, creative, and political forces. This book tells the captivating story of one writer's rise from obscurity to fame through a cultural reappraisal of the work he left behind.
Thoreau's Living Ethics is the first full, rigorous account of Henry Thoreau's ethical philosophy. Focused on Walden but ranging widely across his writings, the study situates Thoreau within a long ...tradition of ethical thinking in the West, from the ancients to the Romantics and on to the present day. Philip Cafaro shows Thoreau grappling with important ethical questions that agitated his own society and discusses his value for those seeking to understand contemporary ethical issues. Cafaro's particular interest is in Thoreau's treatment of virtue ethics: the branch of ethics centered on personal and social flourishing. Ranging across the central elements of Thoreau's philosophy-life, virtue, economy, solitude and society, nature, and politics-Cafaro shows Thoreau developing a comprehensive virtue ethics, less based in ancient philosophy than many recent efforts and more grounded in modern life and experience. He presents Thoreau's evolutionary, experimental ethics as superior to the more static foundational efforts of current virtue ethicists. Another main focus is Thoreau's environmental ethics. The book shows Thoreau not only anticipating recent arguments for wild nature's intrinsic value, but also demonstrating how a personal connection to nature furthers self-development, moral character, knowledge, and creativity. Thoreau's life and writings, argues Cafaro, present a positive, life-affirming environmental ethics, combining respect and restraint with an appreciation for human possibilities for flourishing within nature.
The Maine Woods, vast and largely unsettled, are often described as unchanged since Henry David Thoreau's journeys across the backcountry, in spite of the realities of Indian dispossession and the ...visible signs of logging, settlement, tourism, and real estate development. In the summer of 2014 scholars, activists, members of the Penobscot Nation, and other individuals retraced Thoreau's route.
Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later.
Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.
Thoreau's Reading charts Henry Thoreau's intellectual growth and its relation to his literary career from 1833, when he entered Harvard College, to his death in 1862. It also furnishes a catalogue of ...nearly fifteen hundred entries of his reading, compiled from references and allusions in his published writings, journal, correspondence, library charging records, the catalogue of his personal library, and his many unpublished notebooks and commonplace books. This record suggests his literary and intellectual development as a youth primarily interested in classical and early English literature, who matured as a writer investigating contemporary and classical natural science, the history of the European discovery and exploration of North America, and the history of native Americans.
The catalogue provides bibliographical data for, and lists all Thoreau's references to, the books and articles that he read. The introductory essay traces the shifts in his literary career marked in the chronology of his reading. The book reveals a Thoreau who was deeply interested in and conversant with the major intellectual questions of his times and whose stance of withdrawal from his age masked a lively involvement with many of its most perplexing questions.
Originally published in 1988.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Today, Henry David Thoreau's status as one of America's most influential public intellectuals remains unchallenged. Recent scholarship on Thoreau has highlighted his activism as a committed ...antislavery reformer and proto-environmentalist whose life became a seminal model for the image of the liberal conscience. While modern scholars have firmly established Thoreau's relevance, their focus on his public activism has undervalued the complexity and range of his contributions to American political thought and has neglected crucial facets of his philosophy regarding democratic citizenship.
InThe Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau, Jonathan McKenzie analyzes not only Thoreau's well-known works but also his journals and correspondence to provide a fresh portrait of the Sage of Walden as a radical individualist. This new account examines the influence that ancient philosophers, particularly the Stoics, had on Thoreau and demonstrates his importance as one of the best modern interpreters of Socrates's vision of the self. McKenzie also argues that Thoreau's own political life was shaped by a theory of privatism that encouraged both a radical simplification of one's commitments and regular engagement in experiments that plumbed life for its most essential values.
Shunning grand abstractions and cosmopolitanism in favor of the wonders of daily life, Thoreau's work provides a critique of political and social life that seeks to restore the wholeness of the human subject by rescuing it from the clutches of public concerns. Indeed, McKenzie's nuanced, provocative analysis reveals Thoreau as a multifaceted philosopher who brilliantly wrestled with the complexities of ethical participation in modern democracy.
From Thoreau's renowned Journal, a treasury of memorable, funny, and sharply observed accounts of his encounters with the wild and domestic animals of Concord Many of the most vivid writings in the ...renowned Journal of Henry David Thoreau concern creatures he came upon when rambling the fields, forests, and wetlands of Concord and nearby communities. A keen and thoughtful observer, he wrote frequently about these animals, always sensitive to their mysteries and deeply appreciative of their beauty and individuality. Whether serenading the perch of Walden Pond with his flute, chasing a loon across the water's surface, observing a battle between black and red ants, or engaging in a battle of wits with his family's runaway pig, Thoreau penned his journal entries with the accuracy of a scientist and the deep spirituality of a transcendentalist and mystic. This volume, like its companion Thoreau's Wildflowers, is arranged by the days of the year, following the progress of the turning seasons. A selection of his original sketchbook drawings is included, along with thirty-five exquisite illustrations by naturalist and artist Debby Cotter Kaspari.
"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 ...inWalden.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.
Early in Thoreau's career, he became obsessed with the problem of getting to be at home in the world. This ambitious book relates that obsession to his way of fostering at-homeness: "inscribing" ...himself not only through words but through such occupations as the making of books, houses, and tracks in the woods. Frederick Garber reveals that a complex fable endemic in Thoreau and perceptible from his earliest major writings puts inscribing and the quest for at-homeness in terms of a search for a home of homes, a quest that Thoreau realized must be ultimately unsuccessful. Focusing on Thoreau's major works, particularly on A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Garber explores the rich intertextual dialogue arising from this fable and Thoreau's concerns about at-homeness and inscribing. Garber discloses Thoreau's conviction that human lives are radically open-ended, at least in terms of what we can know in the present. All our modes of inscribing are inadequate, even though we can glimpse the possibility of ultimate words and sentences saying all that ever needed to be said.
Originally published in 1991.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
