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"Newman, Lance"
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Our common dwelling : Henry Thoreau, transcendentalism, and the class politics of nature
OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.
eBook
John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Walking
[...]both Clare and Thoreau were acutely conscious of-and artfully cultivated-their identities as ordinary country people with homegrown knowledge of actual nature, as opposed to literary Nature. [...]how we move through space shapes our habits of mind, and both Clare and Thoreau came to understand the world from the moving perspective of the footpath. [...]both wrote about nature in texts that are structured, not by the typical device of the prospect view, but as ambulatory excursions across horizontal landscapes. [...]Clare is able to leap effortlessly from sympathizing with 'little birds in winters frost and snow' to meditating on the universality of 'fondness' for one's 'native place' to describing beetles dancing on the surface of a stream to lamenting 'the woodmans cruel axe' to marveling at a pasture bedecked with kingcups and cowslaps to denouncing 'accursed wealth' for starving the poor and levelling the woods. [...]intimate knowledge of the local community grounds their identification-they would have called it sympathy- with other beings, whether human, animal, or vegetable, which in turn inspires their ethical commitment to the community's wellbeing.
Journal Article
Wordsworth in America and the Nature of Democracy
For his first US readers--the rising generation of the northern elite in the 1830s--William Wordsworth was both the Prophet of Democracy and the Poet of Nature. In fact, these roles were inseparable, for his close association with rural scenes made him a fit representative of an especially \"sanative\" version of the ocratic impulse.
Journal Article
Nature, Politics, and Thoreau’s Materialism
When Thoreau and the Brook Farmers planted and pounded their beans, they were engineering for all America, but they were confronted with hard limits to the independence of their projects for reform.1 In the end, they could not come out of society, for it came after them. Thoreau’s experiment, his model citizenship in the utopian community of nature, could only have its desired effect with the publication of his report. But this meant devoting himself to the hard labor of taking the manuscript of Walden through seven substantive revisions over as many years, which itself meant returning to the labor of making pencils and surveying town lots. What his report finally produced was not a new dawn, but lukewarm reviews emphasizing the peculiarity of a Yankee woodsman who inexplicably felt he should do everything himself. The Brook Farmers watched their nearly completed, but uninsured, phalanstery burn to the ground. This was a fatal blow to the finances of the phalanx and, after a short flurry of desperate activity, the members dispersed. George Ripley moved to New York, where he worked for decades in various editorial capacities in order to pay off the farm’s debt. Most members, though, were so disheartened as to abandon their dreams of socialism entirely. In later years, they produced a number of sentimental (or cynical) memoirs of what they now regarded as an episode of youthful enthusiasm.
Book Chapter
Ecocriticism and the Uses of Nature Writing
Just as Thoreau projected his ambitions onto an idealized nature, so do we see ourselves in him. His extravagant descriptions of the natural world have produced remarkably divergent readings. The first verdict, passed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell, was that he had failed to live up to his potential greatness, managing no more than to become a describer of pretty scenes. This judgment was influential enough that early attempts to revive his reputation, such as by Vernon Louis Parrington and Van Wyck Brooks, were carried out by ignoring the nature writing and emphasizing the democratic political implications of his radical individualism. Then, in the mid-century climate of political reaction, scholars limited themselves to reading Walden as a well-wrought urn. In Perry Millers words, it was “a highly schematized pattern of words … designed not so much to make a sociological point, as to become a thing of beauty” in and of itself. Similarly, R.W.B. Lewis gave us a Thoreau who was the paradigmatic “American Adam,” the self-creating artist, sporting there alone in the universe. Walden was a portrait of a self-reliant consciousness soaring above a utilitarian society. On this reading, Thoreau’s nature was seen as little more than a rhetorical strategy: Walden Pond and figures like the hawk in this passage were vehicles of self-reflexive metaphor, the raw material of the literary craft that was his true concern.1
Book Chapter