Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-century Natural ScienceUniversity of Wisconsin Press, 1995 - 300 pages Thoreau was a poet, a naturalist, a major American writer. Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture. Walls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau s day deeply influenced his best work, from Walden to the Journal to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the two cultures we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt s scientific approach resulted in not only his marriage of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his The Dispersion of Seeds since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of Origin of Species. This book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, organic Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, Seeing New Worlds bridges today s two cultures in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature. -- Amazon.com. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Transcendental Science from Cambridge | 15 |
The Empire of Thought and the Republic of Particulars | 53 |
Copyright | |
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Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science Laura Dassow Walls No preview available - 1995 |
Common terms and phrases
Agassiz Alexander von Humboldt American animals Baconian beauty becomes called chaos Coleridge Coleridge's collecting Concord connection construction Cosmos created creation culture Darwin dead discipline discovery Dispersion Donna Haraway dualism earth Emerson empiricism essay experience facts field forces forest Frémont harmony Henry David Thoreau holism human Humboldtian science idea ideal imagination insists Journal knowledge language literary literature living look loon material matter measure metaphor mind moral narrative natural history natural theology naturalist nature's never oaks object observation organic organicism Origin of Species particular phenomena philosophy pine pitch pine plant poet poetry polar principle relation romantic Sattelmeyer scientific scientist seedlings seeds sense social society species spirit spring squirrels symbol theory things thought transcendental transcendentalist trees truth turn unity universe vision Walden Pond Walking whole wild apples wood thrush woods writing