A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau
Title | A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau PDF eBook |
Author | Jack Turner |
Publisher | University Press of Kentucky |
Pages | 496 |
Release | 2009-07-17 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 081317287X |
The writings of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have captivated scholars, activists, and ecologists for more than a century. Less attention has been paid, however, to the author’s political philosophy and its influence on American public life. Although Thoreau’s doctrine of civil disobedience has long since become a touchstone of world history, the greater part of his political legacy has been overlooked. With a resurgence of interest in recent years, A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau is the first volume focused exclusively on Thoreau’s ethical and political thought. Jack Turner illuminates the unexamined aspects of Thoreau’s political life and writings. Combining both new and classic essays, this book offers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Thoreau’s politics, and includes discussions of subjects ranging from his democratic individualism to the political relevance of his intellectual eccentricity. The collection consists of works by sixteen prominent political theorists and includes an extended bibliography on Thoreau’s politics. A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau is a landmark reference for anyone seeking a better understanding of Thoreau’s complex political philosophy.
The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau
Title | The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau PDF eBook |
Author | Joel Myerson |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 252 |
Release | 1995-06-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780521440370 |
The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau is intended as an accessible guide to reading and understanding the works of Thoreau. Presenting essays by a distinguished array of contributors, the Companion is a valuable resource for historical and contextual material, whether on early writings like A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, on the monumental Walden, or on his assorted journals and later books. It also serves in some ways as a biographical guide, offering new insights into his turbulent publishing career, and his brief but extraordinarily original life. In short, the Companion helps the reader come to Thoreau's writings, as he would say, 'deliberately and reservedly' by suggesting how Thoreau uses language, how his biography informs his writing, how personal and historical influences shaped his career, and how his writings function as literary works.
A Political Companion to Herman Melville
Title | A Political Companion to Herman Melville PDF eBook |
Author | Jason Frank |
Publisher | University Press of Kentucky |
Pages | 456 |
Release | 2014-01-07 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0813143888 |
Herman Melville is widely considered to be one of America's greatest authors, and countless literary theorists and critics have studied his life and work. However, political theorists have tended to avoid Melville, turning rather to such contemporaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to understand the political thought of the American Renaissance. While Melville was not an activist in the traditional sense and his philosophy is notoriously difficult to categorize, his work is nevertheless deeply political in its own right. As editor Jason Frank notes in his introduction to A Political Companion to Herman Melville, Melville's writing "strikes a note of dissonance in the pre-established harmonies of the American political tradition." This unique volume explores Melville's politics by surveying the full range of his work -- from Typee (1846) to the posthumously published Billy Budd (1924). The contributors give historical context to Melville's writings and place him in conversation with political and theoretical debates, examining his relationship to transcendentalism and contemporary continental philosophy and addressing his work's relevance to topics such as nineteenth-century imperialism, twentieth-century legal theory, the anti-rent wars of the 1840s, and the civil rights movement. From these analyses emerges a new and challenging portrait of Melville as a political thinker of the first order, one that will establish his importance not only for nineteenth-century American political thought but also for political theory more broadly.
Thoreau: Political Writings
Title | Thoreau: Political Writings PDF eBook |
Author | Henry David Thoreau |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 220 |
Release | 1996-05-23 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780521476751 |
Thoreau's political writing is intensely personal and direct. Both his life and work focus uncompromisingly on the question 'how should I live?', and for Thoreau, no element of day-to-day existence is left untouched by moral and political issues. This 1996 edition of Thoreau's political essays includes 'Civil Disobedience', selections from Walden, 'Life Without Principle', and the anti-slavery addresses, such as 'Slavery in Massachusetts'. In her introduction, Nancy L. Rosenblum places the essays in the context of Thoreau's life of self-examination, and the debates about the abolition of slavery, and she analyses the themes of citizenship and resistance that have made Thoreau an enduring influence in political philosophy and practice.
The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience
Title | The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience PDF eBook |
Author | William E. Scheuerman |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 457 |
Release | 2021-07-15 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1108804845 |
The theory and practice of civil disobedience has once again taken on import, given recent events. Considering widespread dissatisfaction with normal political mechanisms, even in well-established liberal democracies, civil disobedience remains hugely important, as a growing number of individuals and groups pursue political action. 'Digital disobedients', Black Lives Matter protestors, Extinction Rebellion climate change activists, Hong Kong activists resisting the PRC's authoritarian clampdown...all have practiced civil disobedience. In this Companion, an interdisciplinary group of scholars reconsiders civil disobedience from many perspectives. Whether or not civil disobedience works, and what is at stake when protestors describe their acts as civil disobedience, is systematically examined, as are the legacies and impact of Henry Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau
Title | Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 1995 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9785214403786 |
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."--