Seeing New Worlds : Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Seeing New Worlds : Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science

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.
   

Laura Dassow Walls is assistant professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.