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On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods - an event that altered the landscape of American thought in a single day. Against the backdrop of Thoreau's fire, Pipkin's ambitious debut penetrates the mind of the young philosopher while painting a panorama of the young nation at a formative moment.

Recent Thoreau studies have shifted to an emphasis on the green\" Thoreau, on Thoreau the environmentalist, rooted firmly in particular places and interacting with particular objects. In the wake of Buell'sEnvironmental Imagination,the nineteen essayists in this challenging volume address the central questions in Thoreau studies today: how \"green,\" how immersed in a sense of place, was Thoreau really, and how has this sense of place affected the tradition of nature writing in America? The contributors to this stimulating collection address the ways in which Thoreau and his successors attempt to cope with the basic epistemological split between perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature; related discussions involve the kinds of discourse most effective for writing about place. They focus on the impact on Thoreau and his successors of culturally constructed assumptions deriving from science, politics, race, gender, history, and literary conventions. Finally, they explore the implications surrounding a writer's appropriation or even exploitation of places and objects.

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.

The image of the storyteller, actually or metaphorically imprisoned because of dominant social conditions, attempting to make an impact on consciousness and avert tragedy from the margins, interacts with the figure of the ascetic writer throughout Paul Auster’s fiction. In several novels Auster’s protagonists retreat to a small room and emerge as something other than a storyteller, acting within a supposedly “democratic” process. Indeed, the scenario often outlined in Auster’s fiction is that the protagonist encounters obstacles to the production of narratives that can influence the consciousness of the reader, and resorts to some form of political activism, coercion or “terrorism”. In many respects it could be argued that Auster’s interaction with writing, politics and direct political action mirrors that of one of his literary idols, Henry David Thoreau. As I will outline below, Thoreau’s writing and documented career can be taken as an exemplary illustration of the paradox between the literary writer’s drive to move readers’ hearts and minds as part of the democratic process of publication, and the drive towards coercion, a drive to impose one’s own world view on one’s subject. This is a true paradox, as often a coercive figure such as a terrorist and a writer can work from a point of opposition to exactly the same political issue, and only differ over which method to adopt. It could also be argued, conversely, that in certain instances the terrorist, in common with the dominant social order, uses methods of coercion to assume total authority over its subject. This may bring to mind Richard Rorty’s succinct summary of the central problem of contemporary literary theory as being: “the problem of how to overcome authority without claiming authority” (105). This “Thoreauvian paradox”, it will be demonstrated, is present in Auster’s early work and could be used to challenge some of the tunnel-visioned “postmodernist” readings that seemed to pervade the critical response. In this essay, I will first outline how the career of Thoreau can be seen as an exemplary illustration of the competing drives in a literary writer towards asceticism and political activism. After this I will demonstrate similarities in Auster’s approach to these subjects before providing an alternative reading of Ghosts set in the context of The New York Trilogy as a whole, arguing that Auster consciously uses both Walden and Thoreau as a literary figure to investigate contradictions which concerned him as a young writer. Having established the presence of these competing drives in Auster’s early works, I will conclude by focusing on the way that this tendency was revisited and evolved in later works.

Ancré dans une tradition culturelle ou se melaient littérature, arts et histoire, l'amour inconditionnel que Ruskin portait a la nature (« cette passion qui a gouverné ma vie » (5.365)) était selon lui indissociable d'une identité et d'une culture européennes fortes. Comme il l'affirme dans le volume 3 des Peintres Modernes, cet attachement « ne pouvait etre ressenti que par un enfant issu d'une culture européenne contemporaine [...] [conscient] du contraste saisissant entre un passé glorieux et un présent tragique ou morne [...] cet instinct naturel ne peut guere etre ressenti en Amérique et chaque jour ou l'on voit l'architecture ou la mode s'embellir ou que l'on renverse la pierre d'un édifice médiéval contribue a l'affaiblir en Europe »' (5.369). Cette critique ouverte de l'Amérique est loin d'etre isolée sous la plume de Ruskin qui, meme s'il possédait des amis et des admirateurs américains, ne se rendit jamais aux États-Unis. Comme il le redit dans Fors, il lui « était impossible, meme pour quelques mois, de se rendre dans un pays dont le plus grand malheur était d'etre dépourvu de chateaux » (27.170). Par ailleurs, Ruskin se méfiait d'un pays qui faisait confiance a la démocratie, ne possédait pas de traditions culturelles historiquement établies et revendiquait au contraire un goÛt pour la nouveauté. Il doutait de l'optimisme américain qui lui semblait naif et simpliste. Par contraste, le rapport que Ruskin entretenait avec la nature passait par « un réseau invraisemblable de voies intellectuelles et de ramifications nerveuses le reliant a l'histoire tragique de cette bonne vieille patrie autant que par l'histoire de cette pensée européenne traversant les siecles depuis les temps mythologiques anciens jusqu'au rationalisme et a l'antirationalisme le plus moderne » (36.533). Pour lui, la façon dont les Américains envisageaient la nature impliquait de faire fi du passé et de se libérer de toutes ces valeurs auxquelles il était si attaché, ce que cet article s'attachera a démontrer en comparant les differences entre la vision de la nature nourrie par Ruskin et celle - tout aussi vive - de quelques auteurs naturalistes américains parmi les plus influents : Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, et John Muir.

Freeing up space for the subject in an increasingly instrumentalized world is paramount in all of the preceding essays, and it is central to the three essays that form the backbone of the issue.[...]Thomas Peyser demonstrates with great lucidity that the peaceful utopics of Henry David Thoreau does not spring from nature alone, but instead is grounded in any ecology (whether natural or social) where spontaneous order is given a chance.[...]Joshua Rivas unpacks the snap-on/snap-off logic of the gay subculture described in Guillaume Dustan's Dans ma chambre.[...]Mosaic is pleased to include a portfolio of eight photographs by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher taken in Florida on election-day Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

This essay will serve the double purpose of investigating the aesthetic dimensions of Thoreau’s environmental philosophy as depicted in his classic memoir Walden (1854) while examining the philosophical and political implications of its tendency to break down the boundaries between natural and technological landscapes. Although critics have tended to identify Thoreau as deeply rooted in an Emersonian transcendentalist tradition viewing nature as an organized and holistic “whole”, I will argue that Thoreau’s ecophilosophy seeks to reconcile the idealistic with the empirical pole and highlight the tensions between natural and technological objects and situations. I will start by studying how Thoreau approaches man-made technologies and develops a proto-ecocritical form of the sublime. I will also argue that a reconsideration of Thoreau’s poetics sheds a new light on the goals of environmental (non)fiction and urges the reader to reconsider the concept of the Anthropocene as the Capitalocene.

1 In this vivid and absorbing account, Reisen addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the impact of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic and often desperate economic difficulties; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; her literary successes; and the loss of her health and early death at the age of fifty-five. Louisa Alcott held the jobs heroine Christie Devon holds in the gritty novel Work; loved the two men, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who inspired the characters Sylvia Yule loves in Moods; served in the Civil War as a nurse, as Tribulation Periwinkle does in Hospital Sketches; and displays her infinite variety in a lifetime of poetry, journals, and letters. [...]Hawthorne's literary ship came in with the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850, The House of Seven Gables in 1851, and The Blithedale Romance in 1852. With a beaming face she kissed him saying, 'I call that doing very well. Since you are safely home, dear, we don't ask anything more.'

Mitchell's formally ambitious and innovative novels, this is to say, possess features relevant to accounts of recent shifts in contemporary literary production-for instance, as a means of understanding the place of the novel in the age of ubiquitous new media and of literature's role in the persistence of religion (both weak and fundamentalist) in the contemporary period, giving rise to descriptions of the present as a postsecular age.5 Mitchell's importance as a novelist lies in the significant way he has overlaid these two major sociopolitical and formal problems as expressions of each other. [...]I will argue that Mitchell's novels are interrogations of, and in part formal imitations of, contemporary forms of new media.

Both the popular and critical success of Le Guin's novel made it possible for the formally more radical experiments of Joanna Russ (The Female Man, begun in 1969 but not published until 1975), as well as Russ's criticism such as the pioneering 'The Images of Women in Science Fiction' (1971). Like Philip K. Dick, with whom she coincidentally graduated from the same high school, Le Guin questioned the nature of reality as so many competing simulacra, an interrogation that underwrote not only her finest standalone sf novel, The Lathe of Heaven (1971), but also a brilliant short story cycle, Changing Planes (2003). [...]please note that the SFF urgently needs two new voluntary positions to support the work of the Memberships Secretary and the Treasurer - an advert with further details can be found within these pages.