Thoreau at 200 Essays and Reassessments

About this book

Henry David Thoreau's thinking about a number of issues – including the relationship between humans and other species, just responses to state violence, the threat posed to human freedom by industrial capitalism, and the essential relation between scientific 'facts' and poetic 'truths' – speaks to our historical moment as clearly as it did to the 'restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century' into which he was born. Thsi book, marking the two-hundredth anniversary of Thoreau's birth, gathers the threads of the contemporary, interdisciplinary conversation around this key figure in literary, political, philosophical, and environmental thought, uniting new essays by scholars who have shaped the field with chapters by emerging scholars investigating previously underexplored aspects of Thoreau's life, writings, and activities. Both a dispatch from the front lines of Thoreau scholarship and a vivid demonstration of Thoreau's relevance for twenty-first-century life and thought, Thoreau at 200 will be of interest for both Thoreau scholars and general readers.

Contents

Introduction Kristen Case and K. P. Van Anglen

Part I. Thoreauvian Materialism(s):
1. Thoreau's materialism and twenty-first-century environmentalism Lance Newman
2. A Free Soiler in his own broad sense: Henry David Thoreau and the Free Soil movement James S. Finley
3. Emancipation from the 'invisible hand': Thoreau's 'economy of living' Susan E. Gallagher

Part II. The Local Context:
4. Thoreau and Concord's black history Elise Lemire
5. Red Walden: Thoreau and Native America Joshua David Bellin
6. 'Beyond all men of his day': T. W. Higginson and Thoreau's legacy in postbellum America Sandra Harbert Petrulionis
7. 'The nick of time': Thoreau, New England, and America from Early Republic to Civil War Robert A. Gross

Part III. The Global Context:
8. Culture and conflict: Thoreau, Great Britain, and the Civil War Len Gougeon
9. Transnational Thoreau: time, space, and relativity Paul Giles
10. Coleridge, Thoreau, and the transatlantic 'riddle of the world' Samantha Celeste Harvey and Rochelle L. Johnson
11. Hearing animals: Thoreau between fable and elegy Wai Chee Dimock

Part IV. Thoreauvian Cosmos:
12. The value of mutual intelligence: science, poetry, and Thoreau's cosmos Laura Dassow Walls
13. Disaffiliation as engagement Lawrence Buell
14. Thoreau and Cavell: unauthorized versions Lawrence Rhu
15. Thoreau and the new American spirituality Alan D. Hodder
16. The rooster's philosophy, or the gospel according to this moment Robert D. Richardson

Customer Reviews

Biography

Kristen Case is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine, Farmington. She is former editor of the Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies and director of Thoreau's Kalendar: An Online Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau. Her recent publications include Little Arias (2015, a book of poems) and American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (2011).

K. P. Van Anglen has recently retired from teaching English and American literature at Boston University. His publications include 'Simplify, Simplify' and Other Quotations from Henry David Thoreau (2012), Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (2008) and The New England Milton (1993). He is editor of the Translations volume in the series The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (1986).