Thoreau's Animals

Thoreau's Animals PDF Author: Henry David Thoreau
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300223765
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"From Thoreau's renowned Journal, a treasury of memorable, funny, and sharply observed accounts of the wild and domestic animals of Concord."--Front flap.

Thoreau's Animals

Thoreau's Animals PDF Author: Henry David Thoreau
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300223765
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"From Thoreau's renowned Journal, a treasury of memorable, funny, and sharply observed accounts of the wild and domestic animals of Concord."--Front flap.

Thoreau's Nature

Thoreau's Nature PDF Author: Jane Bennett
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742521414
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild explores how Thoreau crafted a life open to 'the Wild,' a term that marks the startling element of foreignness in every object of experience, however familiar. Thoreau's encounters with nature, Bennett argues, allowed him to resist his all-too-human tendency toward intellectual laziness, social conformity, and political complacency. Bennett pursues this theme by constructing a series of dialogues between Thoreau and our contemporaries: Foucault on identity and power, Haraway on the nature/culture of division, Hollywood celebrities on the Walden Woods Project, the National Endowment for the Humanities on politics and art, and Kafka on the question of political idealism. The pertinence to the late 20th century of Thoreau's pursuit of independent judgment, ecological foresight, and moral nobility becomes apparent through these engagements.

Thoreau's Wildflowers

Thoreau's Wildflowers PDF Author: Henry David Thoreau
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300214774
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The first collection of Thoreau's writings on the flowering plants of Concord, with more than 200 drawings by renowned artist Barry Moser Some of Henry David Thoreau's most beautiful nature writing was inspired by the flowering trees and plants of Concord. An inveterate year-round rambler and journal keeper, he faithfully recorded, dated, and described his sightings of the floating water lily, the elusive wild azalea, and the late autumn foliage of the scarlet oak. This inviting selection of Thoreau's best flower writings is arranged by day of the year and accompanied by Thoreau's philosophical speculations and his observations of the weather and of other plants and animals. They illuminate the author's spirituality, his belief in nature's correspondence with the human soul, and his sense that anticipation--of spring, of flowers yet to bloom--renews our connection with the earth and with immortality. Thoreau's Wildflowers features more than 200 of the black-and-white drawings originally created by Barry Moser for his first illustrated book, Flowering Plants of Massachusetts. This volume also presents "Thoreau as Botanist," an essay by Ray Angelo, the leading authority on the flowering plants of Concord.

Thoreau's Living Ethics

Thoreau's Living Ethics PDF Author: Philip Cafaro
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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.

Thoreau's Country

Thoreau's Country PDF Author: David R. Foster
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037154
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland, small woodlands, and farmers endlessly working the land. As Foster explored the New England landscape, he discovered ancient ruins of cellar holes, stone walls, and abandoned cartways--all remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How had Thoreau's open countryside, shaped by ax and plough, divided by fences and laneways, become a forested landscape? Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions, human and natural, offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land. Extensive excerpts from the journals show us, through the vividly recorded details of daily life, a Thoreau intimately acquainted with the ways in which he and his neighbors were changing and remaking the New England landscape. Foster adds the perspective of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian, using the journals to trace themes of historical and social change. Thoreau's journals evoke not a wilderness retreat but the emotions and natural history that come from an old and humanized landscape. It is with a new understanding of the human role in shaping that landscape, Foster argues, that we can best prepare ourselves to appreciate and conserve it today. From the journal: "I have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood--rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees--perhaps half or three quarters of a tree...Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it, and, last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while it is burning in the winter evening. That is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge, perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it...Thus one half of the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy." --October 20, 1855

Thoreau's Religion

Thoreau's Religion PDF Author: Alda Balthrop-Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108835104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Boldly reconfigures Walden for contemporary ethics and politics by recovering Thoreau's theological vision of environmental justice.

Henry David Thoreau in Context

Henry David Thoreau in Context PDF Author: James S. Finley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108500978
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 655

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Book Description
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.

Thoreau's Late Career and The Dispersion of Seeds

Thoreau's Late Career and The Dispersion of Seeds PDF Author: Michael Benjamin Berger
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571131683
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
It demonstrates that in his late career Thoreau was working as scientist and poet simultaneously. This study further explorers how Thoreau managed the philosophical and rhetorical tensions involved in bridging the supposed gap between science and poetry, and how, in his later career, he embraced the empirical method of scientific discovery while challenging the reductive assumptions of scientific materialism."--BOOK JACKET.

Thoreau and the Sociological Imagination

Thoreau and the Sociological Imagination PDF Author: Shawn Chandler Bingham
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742560598
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Thoreau and the Sociological Imagination: The Wilds of Society is the first in-depth sociological examination of the ideas of Henry David Thoreau. By exploring Thoreau's intellectual links to early social thinkers, as well as addressing mainstay Thoreauvian concerns such as the individual-society relationship, social change, and deconstructing society's idea of progress, Shawn Chandler Bingham illustrates the sophistication of Thoreau's sociological imagination, challenging readers to reexamine the disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities. Book jacket.

Civilized Creatures

Civilized Creatures PDF Author: Jennifer Mason
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801880711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives. Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized life. And to the minds of many in this period, national prosperity depended less on periodic exposure to untamed, wild nature than it did on the proper care and keeping of such animals within suburban and urban environments. Combining literary analysis with cultural histories of equestrianism, petkeeping, and the animal welfare movement, Civilized Creatures offers new readings of works by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles W. Chesnutt. In each case, Mason demonstrates that understanding contemporary relationships between humans and animals is essential for understanding the debates about gender, race, and cultural power enacted in these texts.