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"Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862)"
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Thoreau's Living Ethics
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.
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The Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau
Today, Henry David Thoreau's status as one of America's most influential public intellectuals remains unchallenged. Recent scholarship on Thoreau has highlighted his activism as a committed antislavery reformer and proto-environmentalist whose life became a seminal model for the image of the liberal conscience. While modern scholars have firmly established Thoreau's relevance, their focus on his public activism has undervalued the complexity and range of his contributions to American political thought and has neglected crucial facets of his philosophy regarding democratic citizenship.
InThe Political Thought of Henry David Thoreau, Jonathan McKenzie analyzes not only Thoreau's well-known works but also his journals and correspondence to provide a fresh portrait of the Sage of Walden as a radical individualist. This new account examines the influence that ancient philosophers, particularly the Stoics, had on Thoreau and demonstrates his importance as one of the best modern interpreters of Socrates's vision of the self. McKenzie also argues that Thoreau's own political life was shaped by a theory of privatism that encouraged both a radical simplification of one's commitments and regular engagement in experiments that plumbed life for its most essential values.
Shunning grand abstractions and cosmopolitanism in favor of the wonders of daily life, Thoreau's work provides a critique of political and social life that seeks to restore the wholeness of the human subject by rescuing it from the clutches of public concerns. Indeed, McKenzie's nuanced, provocative analysis reveals Thoreau as a multifaceted philosopher who brilliantly wrestled with the complexities of ethical participation in modern democracy.
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Thoreau at two hundred : essays and reassessments
\"This volume examines Thoreau's life, writings and thought on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Written by distinguished scholars of Thoreau's life and works, it provides a comprehensive examination of Thoreau's continued relevance today. Subjects covered include Thoreau and the environment, his economic models in Walden, his relation to Native Americans and African Americans, his involvement with the Free Soil movement and abolition, his later reputation, Concord and its history, the Civil War and literary nationalism, his transnational understanding of time and space, his relation to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, literary expressions of our ongoing ecological crisis, and Thoreau as a philosopher and as an exemplar of new dimensions in American religion and spirituality. This book argues that Thoreau was drawn toward empirical, materialist and local, yet also holistic, cosmic and global understandings of nature and experience. It will be of interest to all scholars of Thoreau, and also to American literary studies more widely\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The List
\"I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house,\" wrote Henry David Thoreau inWalden.In creating this list, and many others that appear in his writings, Thoreau was working within a little-recognized yet ancient literary tradition: the practice of listing or cataloguing. This beautifully written book is the first to examine literary lists and the remarkably wide range of ways writers use them.Robert Belknap first examines lists through the centuries-from Sumerian account tablets and Homer's catalogue of ships to Tom Sawyer's earnings from his fence-painting scheme-then focuses on lists in the works of four American Renaissance authors: Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau. Lists serve a variety of functions in Emerson's essays, Whitman's poems, Melville's novels, and Thoreau's memoirs, and Belknap discusses their surprising variety of pattern, intention, scope, art, and even philosophy. In addition to guiding the reader through the list's many uses, this book explores the pleasures that lists offer.
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Writing revolution : aesthetics and politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau
In recent years, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been under attack, charged by critics with isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Historicist and cultural approaches have often responded by simply reversing the picture, reducing texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. In Writing Revolution , Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with—rather than escape from or obscure—social and political issues.
Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment, Bellis's subjects were responding to the same cluster of issues: the need to redefine American identity after the Revolution, the problem of race slavery, and the growing industrialization of American society.
Hawthorne, Bellis contends, sees the romance as "neutral territory" where the Imaginary and the Actual—the aesthetic and the historical—can interpenetrate and address crucial issues of class, race, and technological modernity. Whitman conceives of Leaves of Grass as a transformative democratic space where all forms of meditation, both political and literary, are swept away. Thoreau oscillates between these two approaches. Walden , like the romance, aims to fashion a mediating space between nature and society. His abolitionist essays, however, shift sharply away from both linguistic representation and the political, toward an apocalyptic cleansing violence.
In addition to covering selected works by Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau, Bellis also examines powerful works of social and political critique by Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. With its suggestions for new ways of reading antebellum American writing, Writing Revolution breaks through the thickets of contemporary literary discourse and will spark debate in the literary community.
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Walden x 40
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved from his parents' house in Concord, Massachusetts, to a one-room cabin on land owned by his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. After 26 months he transformed his stay in the woods into one of the most famous events in American history. In Walden x 40, adopting Thoreau's own compositional method, Robert B. Ray takes up several questions posed in Walden. Thoreau developed his books from his lectures, and his lectures from his almost-daily journal notations of the world around him, with its fluctuating weather and appointed seasons, both forever familiar and suddenly brand new. Ray derives his 40 brief essays from the details of Walden itself, reading the book in the way that Thoreau proposed to explore his own life-deliberately. Ray demonstrates that however accustomed we have grown to its lessons, Walden continues to be as surprising as the November snowfall that, Thoreau reports, \"covered the ground... and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter.\"
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