Seeing new worlds : Henry David Thoreau and nineteenth-century natural science / Laura Dassow Walls.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walls, Laura Dassow.

Series:

Science and literature.

Science and literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and science--United States--History--19th century.

Literature and science.

Natural history--United States--History--19th century.

Natural history.

Science in literature.

Nature in literature.

United States--Intellectual life--19th century.

United States.

Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862--Knowledge--Natural history.

Thoreau, Henry David.

Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862--Knowledge--Science.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 300 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Madison WI : University of Wisconsin Press, c1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Intro

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Facts and Truth: Transcendental Science from Cambridge to Concord

Nominalists, Realists, Idealists: Harvard and After, 1837

Romantic Theologies

Natural History before Walden

2. The Empire of Thought and the Republic of Particulars

Law as Logos

Rational Holism

The Organic Machine: Making Matter Mind

Emergent Laws

Empirical Holism

3. Seeing New Worlds: Thoreau and Humboldtian Science

Alexander von Humboldt, the "Napoleon of Science"

Fronting Nature at Walden, 1845-1847

After Walden: Old Worlds and New

4. Cosmos: Knowing as Worlding

Thoreau as Humboldtian

Relational Knowing: Thoreau's Epistemology of Contact

Writing the Cosmos: Walden

5. A Plurality of Worlds

Intentions of the Eye

Worlds without End: The Dispersion of Seeds

The Transcendentalist at the Cattle Show: Thoreau's Ironic Science

6. Walking the Holy Land

Contingent Wholes: A Few Herbs and Apples

Chance and Necessity: The Laughter of the Loon

"Walking, or the Wild"

Conclusion: Disciplining Thoreau

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 280-293) and index.

ISBN:

9786612424083

9781282424081

1282424084

9780299147433

0299147436

OCLC:

44962596