Henry David Thoreau in Context
Title | Henry David Thoreau in Context PDF eBook |
Author | James S. Finley |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 655 |
Release | 2017-04-07 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108500978 |
Well known for his contrarianism and solitude, Henry David Thoreau was nonetheless deeply responsive to the world around him. His writings bear the traces of his wide-ranging reading, travels, political interests, and social influences. Henry David Thoreau in Context brings together leading scholars of Thoreau and nineteenth-century American literature and culture and presents original research, valuable synthesis of historical and scholarly sources, and innovative readings of Thoreau's texts. Across thirty-four chapters, this collection reveals a Thoreau deeply concerned with and shaped by a diverse range of environments, intellectual traditions, social issues, and modes of scientific practice. Essays also illuminate important posthumous contexts and consider the specific challenges of contextualizing Thoreau today. This collection provides a rich understanding of Thoreau and nineteenth-century American literature, political activism, and environmentalist thinking that will be a vital resource for students, teachers, scholars, and general readers.
Henry David Thoreau
Title | Henry David Thoreau PDF eBook |
Author | Laura Dassow Walls |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 668 |
Release | 2017-07-07 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 022634469X |
"[The author] traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and 'America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.' By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated? Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, [the author] presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him."--
Seeing New Worlds
Title | Seeing New Worlds PDF eBook |
Author | Laura Dassow Walls |
Publisher | Univ of Wisconsin Press |
Pages | 318 |
Release | 1995-11-01 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0299147436 |
Thoreau was a poet, a naturalist, a major American writer. Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture. Walls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau’s day deeply influenced his best work, from Walden to the Journal to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the “two cultures” we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific approach resulted in not only his “marriage” of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his “The Dispersion of Seeds” since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of Origin of Species. This book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, “organic” Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau’s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, Seeing New Worlds bridges today’s “two cultures” in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature.
Walden
Title | Walden PDF eBook |
Author | Henry David Thoreau |
Publisher | |
Pages | 280 |
Release | 1882 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau
Title | A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau PDF eBook |
Author | William E. Cain |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 298 |
Release | 2000 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0195138635 |
Thoreau - philosopher, essayist, hermit, tax protester and original thinker - led a singular life. This biography includes contributions of his relationship with 19th cent authority and concepts of the land.
Civil Disobedience
Title | Civil Disobedience PDF eBook |
Author | Henry David Thoreau |
Publisher | Open Road Media |
Pages | 36 |
Release | 2015-05-26 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1504013778 |
Thoreau advocates for nonviolent protest in his classic manifesto Motivated by his disgust with the US government, Henry David Thoreau’s seminal philosophical essay enjoins individuals to stand against the ruling forces that seek to erase their free will. It is the duty of a good citizen, he argues, not only to disobey a bad law, but also to protest an unjust government. His message of nonviolence and appeal to value one’s own conscience over political legislation have resonated throughout American and world history. Peppered with the author’s poetry and social commentary, Civil Disobedience has become a manifesto for civil dissidents, revolutionaries, and protestors everywhere. Indeed, originally so unpopular with readers that Thoreau was forced to buy back over half of the books from his publisher, this work has gone on to inspire the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Title | A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers PDF eBook |
Author | Henry David Thoreau |
Publisher | |
Pages | 416 |
Release | 1883 |
Genre | Concord River (Mass.) |
ISBN |