Journal articles: 'Thoreau'

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Rachman, Stephen. "“White Sleep”: Hawthorne’s Thoreau, Thoreau’s Hawthorne." Studia Litterarum 2, no. 2 (2017): 64–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-2-64-79.

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Fang, Yan. "Labor in Thoreau’s Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers." BCP Social Sciences & Humanities 19 (August 30, 2022): 702–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.54691/bcpssh.v19i.1816.

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Henry David Thoreau plays a critical role in the development of transcendentalist thought and literature. In Thoreau’s Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau reflects upon what labor means. As a parody of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Thoreau expands and negotiates the meaning of labor. Thoreau elaborates the speculative philosophy of intellectual labor and the relationship between work and contemplation, wilderness and civilization. Labor, for Thoreau, has a constant and imperishable moral.

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Zhang, Lin Lin. "The Environmental View of Thoreau’s Walden: The Interpretation of the Relationship between Human and Nature." Applied Mechanics and Materials 675-677 (October 2014): 1048–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/amm.675-677.1048.

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Thoreau was an American famous writer, Walden was his masterpiece, recorded Thoreau’s attitude towards nature, this paper analysis the background of Thoreau, and Walden, give guidance on our environmental protection.

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Yu, Ning. "Thoreau's Critique of the American Pastoral in A Week." Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 3 (December 1, 1996): 304–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2934013.

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This essay questions a critical consensus about Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord an Merrimack Rivers, as a pastoral elegy for his brother and best friend, John. Reading A Week from a geographical perspective, this essay argues that Thoreau anticipated professional geographers by eighty years in conducting a dynamic analysis of the transformation of New England's landscape. Thoreau re-creates through description and narration the appearance and disappearance of the pastoral, the Native-American, and the industrailized landscape along the two rivers. Presenting these ladnscapes in dynamic interrelation with one another against the backdrop of New England's still wild nature, Thoreau historicizes New England's changing topography and thereby criticizes the American pastoral myth about a timeless "golden age" of the "New English Canaan." This reading encourages us to regard Thoreau not only as a private literary artist but also as a scientist and social satirist. This essay also reveals Thoreau's geographic imagination, an important aspect of his mind that has been overlooked so far by Thoreau critics and the general reading public alike.

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Wood, Forrest. "THOREAU." Southwest Philosophy Review 9, no. 2 (1993): 89–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/swphilreview19939221.

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Thoreau." SOCIETÀ DEGLI INDIVIDUI (LA), no. 55 (July 2016): 87–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.3280/las2016-055007.

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Robinson, David M. ""Unchronicled Nations": Agrarian Purpose and Thoreau's Ecological Knowing." Nineteenth-Century Literature 48, no. 3 (December 1, 1993): 326–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2933651.

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Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond reveals two potentially contradictory desires, one of which can be linked to agrarian reform, and the other to ecological knowledge. Thoreau conceived his Walden project in a cultural milieu in which agrarian reform was receiving incrasing attention, and the Walden experiments was, in important ways, an attempt at subsistence farming. But as Thoreau's persistent criticism of the farmers around Concord suggests, he also felt that the economic purpose of farming as it was usually practiced ran counter to his ecological orientation, which stressed the knowledge and preservation of nature, not its economic use. Thoreau's description of his work hoeing beans in "The Bean-Field" chapter of Walden helped to bridge that gap, particularly in its disclourse of the ashes of the "unchronicled nations" who had farmed the area before Thoreau. This act of discovery is one that transcends generational and cultural differences in that it binds Thoreau, through his labor, to a larger pattern of human history. His recognition of the larger historical context of his field work also sharpens his awareness of the natural setting in which the works. Thoreau here exemplifies the way agrarian labor that is not exploitative can function as a mode of spiritual cultivation.

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Parker, Luke. "Thoreau’s luminous Homer in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers." Classical Receptions Journal 12, no. 4 (September 23, 2020): 425–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/crj/claa013.

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Abstract Henry David Thoreau’s relationship to Greek literature, and Homer’s Iliad in particular, is more often remarked than analysed. This article argues that Thoreau’s engagement with Homer in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, proves central to the themes of that work highlighted by critics as well as its less-studied formal hybrid of poetry and prose. I show that Thoreau constructs Homer as the poetic ideal in which the perennially renewed life of the natural world becomes accessible to human beings caught in the fatal and unidirectional movement of historical time. Thoreau’s ideas here may track Romantic conceptions of Homer and Greek literature more generally, but Thoreau turns contemporary uncertainty around the person of Homer into reflection on the relationship between personal experience and literary expression of ‘living nature’. This turns out to structure a larger dichotomy between poetry and prose, one in which Thoreau associates the latter with authentic experience and self-expression of an individual human life. In A Week’s engagement with Homer, then, we see Thoreau negotiating not only some core concerns of his writing but also his evolution from aspiring poet to author of the works in prose that ultimately define his career.

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Hess, Scott. "Walden Pond as Thoreau’s Landscape of Genius." Nineteenth-Century Literature 74, no. 2 (September 1, 2019): 224–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2019.74.2.224.

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Scott Hess, “Walden Pond as Thoreau’s Landscape of Genius” (pp. 224–250) This essay explores how Henry David Thoreau’s identification with Walden Pond was influenced by the nineteenth-century discourse of the literary landscape and by William Wordsworth’s association with the English Lake District in particular. Wordsworth was a central figure for the transatlantic development of the “landscape of genius”—a new form of literary landscape in which the genius of the author, associated with a specific natural landscape, mediated the spiritual power of nature for individual readers and tourists. Wordsworth’s identification of his authorial identity with the Lake District landscape had a formative influence on both Thoreau’s self-conception and his subsequent reception and canonization, as Thoreau and Walden Pond as his landscape of genius entered the canon together. The essay concludes by exploring the ongoing significance of Thoreau’s association with Walden for both his scholarly and popular reputations, including proliferating discourses of “Thoreau Country”; cultural and political disputes over the Concord and Walden landscapes; and invocations of Thoreau as an ecological hero and inspiration for responses to climate change.

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Oltean, Roxana. "'Language ... Without Metaphor'." JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies 1, no. 2 (December 30, 2020): 267–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v1i2.123.

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Henry David Thoreau has been celebrated for his observation of the natural world. While noting Thoreau's skills of observation in relation to the natural world and his responsiveness to sensory experience, scholars have, however, tended to privilege sight over sound. Even though Thoreau was recognized by musicians such as Charles Ives and John Cage for having an exceptionally fine ear for the symphonies of nature, sound still remains a neglected aspect of Thoreau's Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. This article is a corrective to this status quo, as it reads Walden as a transmedial project in which Thoreau frequently tuned in to the sounds encountered during his sojourn in nature in order to figure the essential parameters of his experiment and to relate to the entire world of experience. The complex soundscape of Walden engenders a multifaceted awareness of modern space, as sounds of nature, sounds of progress, and the clamor of people intersect. Accordingly, this article explores how Thoreau uses a vast array of sounds to relate to the world; how he apprehended, and even appreciated, not only the harmonies of nature, but also dissonance—within nature, as well as between nature, modernity and rurality. In doing so, this article proposes a reading of Thoreau's auditory experience as a reflection on, and negotiation with, a multifaceted world where the pastoral and the industrial coexist.

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LaLiberty, Ryan. "Reading Thoreau in Another’s Voice Reading Thoreau." Matlit Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura 5, no. 1 (December 27, 2017): 88–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_5-1_17.

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Reading Thoreau in Another’s Voice Reading Thoreau is an experimental sound work that elucidates the complex network of materialities present in literature. Two sound sources are taken from two public-domain audio readings of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. The two verbatim excerpts — from the chapter “Sounds” where Thoreau expresses his at times ambivalence, at times exuberance, but constant alertness to the soundscape of Walden Pond — are fed into a modular synthesizer. Within the processing domain of the synthesizer, each excerpt is fed into an envelope detector that traces the volume contour of the reading, creating an extractable mimesis of the auditor’s rhythm. These rhythmic envelopes are then applied to the opposite excerpt, forcing the reader to read in the rhythm of the other’s voice. The resulting audio stutters and glitches as one reader opens and closes the mouth of the other. In concert, both readers open up pulsating oscillators that accompany the readings. Sound here is voltage, apart from all semantic content. As the rhythm of the reader’s words is extracted, so too are the extra-semantic components that emerge from the noise of the recording. The network of Walden is broadened thus to include the bodies of its auditors and the noises of its medium.

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Seelinger, Robert A. "A.2. Stolen fire: Aeschylean imagery and Thoreau’s identification of the Graius homo of Lucretius with Prometheus." Studia Humaniora Tartuensia 14 (December 30, 2013): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/sht.2013.14.a.2.

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In his Journal for April 26, 1856, Thoreau noted that he had quickly looked over the first 200 lines of the De Rerum Natura but was “…struck only with the lines referring to Promethius (sic)—whose vivida vis animi…extra/processit longe flammantia moenia mundi.” (1.72–73) During this time (i.e., late April and into May) Thoreau was reading the Roman agricultural writers Columella and Palladius, and it is unclear what led him to pick up the De Rerum Natura and then discard it so quickly. Perhaps most curious is Thoreau’s comment that lines 72–73 refer to Prometheus. No commentator in the context of Thoreau has noted that Lucretius is not actually referring to Prometheus in these lines but to Epicurus. The goal of this paper is to show how these lines in their wording and imagery may have reminded Thoreau of Aeschylus’ description of Prometheus in Prometheus Bound and led him to conclude that lines 1.72–73 of the De Rerum Natura refer to Prometheus.

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Davis, Clark. "Very, Garrison, Thoreau." Nineteenth-Century Literature 74, no. 3 (December 1, 2019): 332–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2019.74.3.332.

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Clark Davis, “Very, Garrison, Thoreau: Variations on the Antebellum Passive” (pp. 332–359) This essay contends that the poetry of Jones Very, often considered predominately “mystical,” was deeply engaged in political debates of the era. Not only did Very often write poems with an avowedly public purpose, but his seemingly otherworldly, spiritual sonnets sometimes participated in antebellum political debates. The sonnet “The Hand and Foot” (1839), for instance, describes a mode of Christian passivity and quietism that echoes the contemporaneous call for passive “non-resistance” to slavery found in William Lloyd Garrison’s 1838 “Declaration of Sentiments,” the foundational statement of the New England Non-Resistance Society. Very’s poem also describes a mode of Christian behavior that is radically disruptive of social conformity, a kind of embodied “prayer” that may have influenced Henry David Thoreau’s more famous manifesto of passive resistance, “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). Thoreau witnessed Very’s passive but disruptive behavior on more than one occasion in Concord, Massachusetts, well before his own unique dramatization of nonconformity in the mid 1840s. Comparing Very’s erasure of individual will to Thoreau’s more canny deployment of passivity can help us clarify antebellum modes of passive engagement as they evolved toward the eventual violence of John Brown’s raid and the American Civil War.

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Lane, Ruth. "Standing “Aloof” from the State: Thoreau on Self-Government." Review of Politics 67, no. 2 (2005): 283–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0034670500033520.

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Long an icon of the American cultural tradition, Henry Thoreau has recently been welcomed into political theory as a theorist whose political writings go beyond the essays on resistance to government, and contain ideas deeply important for understanding the American contribution to democratic experience. I extend this new appreciation by showing how Thoreau presents a specific model of self-government, individual self-government, that occurs under the frequently irrelevant roof provided by liberal democratic state institutions. Thoreau's model of self-government imagines women and men who are largely free of, or indifferent to, the state; but fully involved in an everyday experience that is deeply political because it allocates values for the individual. Walden is, in this sense, less an escape from government than it is an escape to it. Thoreau spans the spectrum of political philosophy, from Socrates′ concern with justice in the individual, to Nietzsche's model of the self as a governable community, but Thoreau's work is unique, and distinctively American, in its model of a hard-headed individual self-government based upon an unsentimentalized natural world.

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McKelvey, Seth. "“But one kind” of Life." Nineteenth-Century Literature 70, no. 4 (March 1, 2016): 448–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2016.70.4.448.

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Seth McKelvey, “‘But one kind’ of Life: Thoreau’s Subjective Theory of Value in Walden” (pp. 448–472) Literary scholars generally take for granted Henry David Thoreau’s hostility to market exchange in Walden (1854). I argue, however, that Thoreau anticipates the subjective theory of value and the related concept of diminishing marginal utility, offering glimpses of ideas that would not be formalized in economics until after his death but that should nevertheless align him with a long lineage of free market thinkers. Thoreau does not reject the marketplace as a means to achieve his own best interests, but rather challenges his society’s definition of what those interests should be, attacking the misguided desire to accumulate excessive material wealth and the burdensome labor that attends such aspirations. I juxtapose the economics put forth in Walden with the work of Austrian free market economist Carl Menger in order to illustrate how Thoreau can so vehemently oppose the materialistic obsessions of capitalism while simultaneously remaining amenable to the principles of free exchange.

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Vera, José Sánchez. "Thoreau as an Oblique Mirror: Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild." American Studies in Scandinavia 47, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): 40–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.22439/asca.v47i1.5160.

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In his nonfiction biography of Christopher McCandless, Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer uses a plethora of references to Henry D. Thoreau. In this article I analyze Krakauer’s use of Thoreau’s economic ideas, liberalism, and view of nature and wilderness. I argue that Krakauer blurs a pragmatic understanding of Thoreau and uses techniques of fiction to create an appealing story and characterize McCandless as a latter-day Thoreauvian transcendentalist. By doing so, Krakauer explains and defends the protagonist’s actions from criticism, thereby making him appear as a character whose story is exceptional. Although the characterization of the protagonist as a follower of Thoreauvian ideals by means of a partial interpretation of Thoreau does not provide us with a better understanding of McCandless’s life, Krakauer’s extensive research and the critical self-reflection in the text produces a compelling nonfiction narrative. Moreover, the romantic image of Thoreau advanced by Krakauer reflects the preoccupations and issues that concerned Krakauer, or at least his times. Particularly, it reflects Krakauer’s own ideas concerning the negative effects of materialism on both ourselves and the natural world.

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Johnston, Carol, Richard Bridgman, and Gertrude Reif Hughes. "Dark Thoreau." South Atlantic Review 50, no. 3 (September 1985): 112. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3199443.

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Golemba, Henry. "Unreading Thoreau." American Literature 60, no. 3 (October 1988): 385. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2926956.

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Pétillon, Pierre-Yves. "Thoreau cosmographe." Esprit Juillet, no. 7 (2014): 95. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/espri.1407.0095.

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Dooley, Patrick K. "Henry Thoreau." Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 18, no. 56 (1990): 33–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/saap1990185620.

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Walters, Kerry. "Reimagining Thoreau." Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 26, no. 80 (1998): 44–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/saap1998268015.

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Buell, Lawrence. "Bicentennial Thoreau." New England Quarterly 92, no. 4 (November 2019): 633–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00772.

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Recent Thoreau scholarship is remarkable for breakthroughs in the study of his life, writing, and scientific pursuits and for conceiving this proverbial outlier's genius as expressing itself within norms of family, community, discipline. Studies of the political Thoreau test the limits variously set by Walls, Gross, Thorson, Arsić, and others.

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Zboray, Mary Saracino. "Digital Thoreau." American Journalism 31, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 421–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2014.936745.

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Stettler, Matteo. "Thoreau’s Stoicism in Letters to Various Persons: The Spiritual Direction of Harrison Blake." Journal of Speculative Philosophy 37, no. 2 (April 2023): 165–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.37.2.0165.

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ABSTRACT In the present contribution, the author contends, first, that “the perfect piece of Stoicism” that Emerson wanted to make out of Thoreau’s philosophical correspondence with his disciple Harrison Blake in Letters to Various Persons (1865) was neither concerned with a personality stereotype, as Sophia Thoreau feared, nor with the specifically Stoic way of living, as Richardson and Risinger have claimed in response. This first edition of Thoreau’s correspondence was in fact meant to be representative of that generally philosophical “art of living well” to which Thoreau was entirely committed. Second, the author provides a comparative analysis of Thoreau’s philosophical letters to his pupil and Seneca’s epistolary with Lucilius, in order to ascertain precisely how Thoreau’s letter-writing itself, apart from Emerson’s framing of it, might have been informed by his knowledge and interest in Stoic epistolary practices.

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Kroeber, K. "Ecology and American Literature: Thoreau and Un-Thoreau." American Literary History 9, no. 2 (February 1, 1997): 309–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/9.2.309.

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Moskowitz, Alex. "Economic Imperception; or, Reading Capital on the Beach with Thoreau." American Literary History 32, no. 2 (2020): 221–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa008.

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Abstract This essay argues that throughout his oeuvre, Henry David Thoreau develops a theory of sensory perception that comes to its literary culmination in Cape Cod (1865). I argue that Thoreau’s thinking on the senses demonstrates that the senses are a product of historical development. In Cape Cod, Thoreau is particularly interested in how economic interest has trained the senses to become structurally incapable of sensing the death that is a necessary part of the commodity form and social life in general—similar to what Karl Marx in Capital (1867) would describe as “dead labor.” This essay explores how in Cape Cod, Thoreau offers his reader a method of reading that seeks to make legible through literary form—specifically through puns, metaphor, and juxtaposition—the point at which the senses fail. Thoreau’s method in Cape Cod therefore differs from his more well-known works such as Walden (1854), where he only explicitly tells his readers about that to which they are blind. Ultimately, I claim that Thoreau’s political message throughout his career remains much the same, but the way in which he mobilizes literary form to convey that message marks an important change in how we might make sense of—and make sensible—political economy.

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Corsa, Andrew J. "John Cage, Henry David Thoreau, Wild Nature, Humility, and Music." Environmental Ethics 43, no. 3 (2021): 219–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics202111828.

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John Cage and Henry David Thoreau draw attention to the indeterminacy of wild nature and imply humans cannot entirely control the natural world. This paper argues Cage and Thoreau each encourages his audience to recognize their own human limitations in relation to wildness, and thus each helps his audience to develop greater humility before nature. By reflecting on how Thoreau’s theory relates to Cage’s music, we can recognize how Cage’s music contributes to audiences’ environmental moral education. We can appreciate the role of music in helping audiences to develop values conducive to environmentally sustainable practices.

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Miller, Tara K., Amanda S. Gallinat, Linnea C. Smith, and Richard B. Primack. "Comparing fruiting phenology across two historical datasets: Thoreau’s observations and herbarium specimens." Annals of Botany 128, no. 2 (April 8, 2021): 159–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcab019.

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Abstract Background and Aims Fruiting remains under-represented in long-term phenology records, relative to leaf and flower phenology. Herbarium specimens and historical field notes can fill this gap, but selecting and synthesizing these records for modern-day comparison requires an understanding of whether different historical data sources contain similar information, and whether similar, but not equivalent, fruiting metrics are comparable with one another. Methods For 67 fleshy-fruited plant species, we compared observations of fruiting phenology made by Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1850s), with phenology data gathered from herbarium specimens collected across New England (mid-1800s to 2000s). To identify whether fruiting times and the order of fruiting among species are similar between datasets, we compared dates of first, peak and last observed fruiting (recorded by Thoreau), and earliest, mean and latest specimen (collected from herbarium records), as well as fruiting durations. Key Results On average, earliest herbarium specimen dates were earlier than first fruiting dates observed by Thoreau; mean specimen dates were similar to Thoreau’s peak fruiting dates; latest specimen dates were later than Thoreau’s last fruiting dates; and durations of fruiting captured by herbarium specimens were longer than durations of fruiting observed by Thoreau. All metrics of fruiting phenology except duration were significantly, positively correlated within (r: 0.69–0.88) and between (r: 0.59–0.85) datasets. Conclusions Strong correlations in fruiting phenology between Thoreau’s observations and data from herbaria suggest that field and herbarium methods capture similar broad-scale phenological information, including relative fruiting times among plant species in New England. Differences in the timing of first, last and duration of fruiting suggest that historical datasets collected with different methods, scales and metrics may not be comparable when exact timing is important. Researchers should strongly consider matching methodology when selecting historical records of fruiting phenology for present-day comparisons.

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Root, Christina. "The Proteus Within." Janus Head 8, no. 1 (2005): 232–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/jh20058149.

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The essay examines passages from Henry David Thoreau's journal and Walden as illustrations of Goethe's phenomenological approach to nature, focusing on the influence on Thoreau of Goethe's discovery of metamorphosis as the generative principle of plants, and his proclamation that "first to last the plant is nothing but leaf." The essay shows how Goethe and Thoreau bring a poet's heightened awareness of language to their scientific observation of nature, and argues that their attention to figurative language, its limits as well as its possibilities, helps them and their readers to develop the needed flexibility to think along with rather than merely about nature.

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Hamendi, Nadia. "From Self-Reliance to Self-Actualization in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Thoreau’s Walden." English Language and Literature Studies 8, no. 2 (May 24, 2018): 102. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v8n2p102.

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This study aims at tracing how the concept of self –reliance as found in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Thoreau’s Walden offer two different paths to achieving self-actualization. It shows that though both believed man starts his journey to self-actualization from the point of self- reliance, Crusoe methodically followed Maslow’s five stages of human needs, while Thoreau steps from stage one to stage five directly for he believed that only by depending on nature for one’s basic needs can he then develop his higher potentialities. Thus, while for Defoe self-reliance was a means, for Thoreau it was an end in itself.

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UDOFIA, Christopher Alexander. "Henry David Thoreau and the Philosophy of Civil Disobedience as a Non-Catalytic Cum Catalytic Model for Conflict Resolution." Stallion Journal for Multidisciplinary Associated Research Studies 2, no. 3 (June 12, 2023): 1–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.55544/sjmars.2.3.1.

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This work with the title “Henry David Thoreau and the Philosophy of Civil Disobedience as a non-catalytic and catalytic Model for Conflict Resolution” is anchored on the thesis which asserts that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good. The research problem which this paper focuses on is to unravel how Thoreau exemplified the philosophy of civil disobedience. The major objective of this essay is to expose the essential definitive elements of the philosophy of civil disobedience. Consequently, this research employs the philosophical tools of exposition, analysis and criticism in its discourse of the subject matter. The research establishes that commitment to civil disobedience as a measure of conflict resolution must be activated from a conscience that is abrasive and nonconformist to evil. The conscience constitutes the highest law and obedience to its dictates confers authenticity on the human being as an indivisible moral entity. Every act of civil disobedience is targeted at disobeying unjust and oppressive laws and or social systems. It is a form of rebellion which calls for active noncompliance to the unjust system. Though most intellectuals affirm that non-violence must be a fundamental element in every act of civil disobedience, Thoreau views the deployment of violence in overcoming injustice as a complementary element of civil disobedience. The use of violence as means to undo evil in the society is however a last resort in Thoreau’s scheme. It is this infusion of violence in the act of civil disobedience which appears to make Thoreau’s thought clash with the logic of consistency since civil disobedience is mostly acclaimed to be a non-violent act of resistance to evil. In submission, it can be gleaned that Thoreau advocated for non-violent civil disobedience only when the oppressive and unjust system is non-recalcitrant to change and transformation. However, when the evil system is totally opposed to change, then Thoreau would subscribe to the employment of a catalytic means to resist the evil system.

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Bradbury, Nicola, and Robert Milder. "Re-Imagining Thoreau." Modern Language Review 92, no. 3 (July 1997): 706. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3733415.

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Brewster, Marty, and Laurence Stapleton. "Thoreau on Writing." English Journal 84, no. 1 (January 1995): 115. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/820493.

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Goodman, Russell B. "Thoreau the Platonist." Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 17, no. 52 (1989): 10–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/saap1989175229.

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Dooley, Patrick. "Thoreau on Writing." Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 19, no. 59 (1991): 24–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/saap1991195913.

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Bennett, Jane. "The Wild Thoreau." Canadian Review of American Studies 25, no. 1 (January 1995): 127–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cras-025-01-06.

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Corsa, Andrew J. "Henry David Thoreau." Environmental Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2015): 161–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/envirophil201511326.

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Witherell, Elizabeth. "Thoreau Manuscripts Sought." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 79, no. 1 (March 1985): 112. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.79.1.24303881.

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Morgan, P. T., and P. Wald. "Preface: Thoreau Symposium." American Literature 85, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 1–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1959517.

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Liu, Qin. "Animals in Walden." English Language and Literature Studies 7, no. 3 (August 9, 2017): 43. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v7n3p43.

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Henry David Thoreau is a great American writer of transcendentalism and the pioneer of modern environmentalism. Being an ardent lover of nature, he devoted his entire life to studying the relationship between man and nature, and bequeathed a legacy of works in this field. He believed that nature was the symbol of spirit, and had a far-reaching influence on man and his character, and human beings should live harmoniously with nature for the long sustainable development. In Walden which is his masterpiece He endows the animals with human characteristics. Thereupon, Thoreau often describes the similarities between animals and people he comes across. People can be just as greedy and shallow as the marmot of the prairie, or as naughty and clumsy as red squirrels, or as lazy and cunning as chickadees, or as loyal as gundogs in Thoreau’s writings. Thoreau spent two years living a simple life at Walden on his own. He recounted in details the living habits of these animals, from woodchucks, loons to mice and hawks.

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Fedorko, Kathy. "“Henry's brilliant sister”: The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother's Posthumous Publications." New England Quarterly 89, no. 2 (June 2016): 222–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00529.

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Ever since the publication of Henry Thoreau's four posthumous essay collections, bibliographers and biographers have credited Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the case of Excursions (1863), or William Ellery Channing, in the case of The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866), with either editing the collections or co-editing them with Sophia Thoreau, Henry's younger sister. This essay provides evidence from letters, books, diaries, and articles, as well as from the essay manuscripts themselves, that Sophia Thoreau alone edited her brother's essay collections for publication after his death from tuberculosis in 1862. She alone also chose the editor for her brother's Journal before her death in 1876.

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Willsky-Ciollo, Lydia. "“May we not see God?”: Henry David Thoreau’s Doctrine of Spiritual Senses." Harvard Theological Review 114, no. 2 (April 2021): 265–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017816021000171.

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AbstractThis article argues that Henry David Thoreau believed in the essential unity of the five senses and privileged each as a source of wild and divine knowledge, which, when combined, created a full picture that might result in a true approximation of God in and beyond nature—the hallmark of Thoreau’s fundamentally incarnational theology. Thoreau treated each sense not only as a source of divine knowledge but as a site of theological discourse: for touch, the relationship between sin and grace; for smell, the conundrum of an eternal divinity acting in historical time; for taste, the efficacy of sacraments; for hearing, the possibility of continuing revelation; and for sight, the ability for human beings to actually see God. The senses were the practical entry point to Thoreau’s theological system, which was concerned with the discovery and redemption of internal “wildness” and reconnection to the mysterious, divine source of that wildness, to the unaccountable in nature.

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Wei, Tang. "Toward Higher Laws: Henry David Thoreau’s Concept of Animal Rights in Walden." LingLit Journal Scientific Journal for Linguistics and Literature 2, no. 1 (March 31, 2021): 25–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.33258/linglit.v2i1.423.

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Though living in the age of Industrialization when the concept of anthropocentricism was prevalent and not a hardcore vegetarian, Thoreau challenged the anthropocentric view of human being’s condescending superiority over animals in Walden. Not only does Thoreau view non-human animals as subjects possessing their own consciousness and sentience, he also regards a consummation of one’s spirituality involves admitting and understanding of one’s inner animality so as to inhibit his savage instinct to hunt or kill animals for food, on the grounds that animals are sentient to feel pain and sufferings and animal food is both unclean and degenerated. Therefore, Thoreau’s humanity to non-human animals inspires and will inspire his modern readers to show more respect for non-human animals and lead them to aspire for a higher stage in their spiritual development. It is in this sense that Thoreau’s concept of animal rights in Walden shakes the solid foundation of anthropocentricism and approximates, if not pioneers, the modern concept of animal rights.

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Forbes, W. "Book Review: No Man's Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature." Journal of Forestry 100, no. 3 (April 1, 2002): 53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jof/100.3.53.

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Abstract No Man's Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature, by Daniel B. Botkin, builds the case for an interdisciplinary Thoreau as well as a utilitarian Thoreau interested in the welfare of human society.

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Willsky-Ciollo, Lydia. "Apostles of Wilderness: American Indians and Thoreau's Theology of the Wild." New England Quarterly 91, no. 4 (December 2018): 551–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00704.

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This article examines the development of Henry David Thoreau's theology of the wild through his engagement with American Indians. Thoreau believed that for peoples' souls to survive being cut off physically from wilderness, they must cultivate this wilderness within–a feat they must learn–and appropriate–from indigenous peoples.

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Griffis, Rachel B. "Critiquing Society from a Distance: Solitude in Hawthorne's and Thoreau's Sabbath Writings." Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 47, no. 1 (May 1, 2021): 84–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.47.1.0084.

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Abstract Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Sunday at Home” and Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers provide two different models for distanced cultural engagement that nevertheless spring from similar philosophical assumptions. The narrator of “Sunday at Home” finds that watching the ritual of church alone from his bedroom window inspires his imagination and bolsters his faith. In the “Sunday” section of A Week, Thoreau criticizes organized religion, through which he champions the virtues of self-reliance and internal freedom. Hawthorne and Thoreau thus each represent public worship as a ritual that threatens to eclipse the otherwise spiritually fruitful opportunities offered by the prohibitions of the Sabbath. Despite their philosophical consensus regarding the dangers of capitulating to social and religious custom, Hawthorne nevertheless indicates his characteristic moderate stance regarding solitude and social distance, a stance that tempers Thoreau's idealistic extremes. As a result, Hawthorne's Sabbath writings offer possibilities for internalizing and thereby modifying Thoreau's demanding principles. In doing so, Hawthorne's work conveys his paradoxical insight that solitude protects one's independence but that distanced cultural engagement catalyzes the imagination and intellect, which, in turn, makes independence enjoyable and life-giving.

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Rossi, William. "Performing Loss, Elegy, and Transcendental Friendship." New England Quarterly 81, no. 2 (June 2008): 252–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.2.252.

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Like friendships among other transcendentalists, that between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau was complicated by loss and grief. Three highly charged moments (1842–49) in their relationship shed new light on Thoreau's capacity for intimacy, his alternative theory of transcendental friendship, and his emergence as a major American writer.

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Menzhulin, Vadym. "The Image of Philosophy in Herman Melville’s Story Cock-A-Doodle-Do! or, the Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano." NaUKMA Research Papers in Philosophy and Religious Studies 13 (July 2, 2024): 73–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.18523/2617-1678.2024.13.73-97.

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The work of the outstanding American writer Herman Melville (1819–1891) is widely acknowledged for its profound philosophical depth. It parallels various philosophical and religious traditions, works, figures, ideas, etc. However, the author’s philosophical position remains insufficiently researched. Among his works, one key in this regard is the short story “Cock-A-Doodle-Do! or, The Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano” (1853). It offers Melville’s feedback on a few ideas of such representatives of American transcendentalism as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), with a particular focus on Thoreau’s analogy likening the purpose of philosophy to the crowing of a rooster. This story is almost completely unknown in Ukraine. Trying to reconstruct Melville’s view on Thoreau’s idea, the author recreates the context of creating “Cock-A-Doodle-Do!”, reviews available scholarly literature, and renders a technical translation of the narrative into Ukrainian. Throughout this process, the author provides commentary and clarifies its connection to ideas of Thoreau and Emerson, works by other authors, additional pieces by Melville, his biography, and related topics. The textual and intertextual analysis highlights the limitations of a common point of view whereby “Cock-A-Doodle-Do!” is only a piece of satire aimed exclusively at discrediting transcendentalism and the image of philosophy proposed by Thoreau. The author suggests that the story manifests Melville’s general attitude characteristic of his work overall and his philosophical method of philosophizing technique grounded in consistent skepticism towards any beliefs, convictions, and assertions, including those held by oneself. The systematic application of this method reveals universal ambivalence. Accordingly, Melville’s reflections on Thoreau’s idea of cockcrowing as a metaphor for philosophy reveal both critical and apologetic dimensions.

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Janelle, Juliette. "Henry David Thoreau en temps de crise sanitaire et environnementale: une lecture utopique des périodiques francophones au Québec." Quebec Studies 77, no. 1 (June 6, 2024): 13–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/qs.2024.3.

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En mars 2020, Louis Hamelin, écrivain québécois associé au genre du nature writing , raconte, dans Le Devoir , son rapport à la pandémie en relisant Henry David Thoreau: il le considère comme « une sorte de prophète de la “distanciation physique” » (2020a). Pendant la même période, Yves Bergeras et Normand Provencher présentent Walden de Henry David Thoreau parmi les classiques à consommer durant la Covid (2020, 7). Malgré le contexte de la pandémie et de la crise environnementale, l’ « existence vécue dans la plus parfaite simplicité » de Thoreau, comme le souligne Provencher ( ibid .), trouve de l’écho au Québec. Dans Walden , Thoreau rencontre Alek Therien, bûcheron canadien-français: « un homme qui se tient debout et qui continue d’entretenir des rêves fous », comme l’indique Marc Chabot (Thoreau 1982, 118–119). La traduction d’ Un Yankee au Canada en 1962 révèle un lien idéalisé entre Thoreau et le Québec. J’émets l’hypothèse que sa représentation utopique continue durant la pandémie, permettant au Québec de questionner son américanité, son nationalisme et sa responsabilité environnementale. Dans le cadre de cet article, je me concentrerai sur les périodiques afin de montrer la représentation de Thoreau que se fait le Québec francophone à partir de 2020. Je commencerai par une rétrospective des publications périodiques antérieures. Ensuite, je reviendrai aux temps de la pandémie et du réchauffement climatique, afin de montrer comment Thoreau a une influence utopique sur le Québec en temps de crise, notamment avec l’avènement du nature writing .

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Stachura, Paweł. "Thoreau’s Surreal Imagery of Homemaking and Mumford’s Myth of the Machine." Kultura Popularna 4, no. 58 (December 30, 2018): 60–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.5604/01.3001.0012.8085.

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The article discusses Henry David Thoreau’s domestic spatial imagery in Walden, in terms of Bachelard’s poetics of space, as a set of angles, nests, crusts, and shells. The analysis identifies uncanny similarities between Thoreau’s imagery and descriptions of megamachines, as defined by Lewis Mumford. The descriptions of megamachines come from a variety of more recent sources from the 20th century, which suggests that the seemingly unrelated, technocratic texts have been inspired by Thoreau.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Thoreau'

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