Thoreau at 200 : Essays and Reassessments

This book celebrates Thoreau's life and is written by distinguished scholars. The contributions are aimed at non-academic readers as well as specialists, and they affirm Thoreau's continued relevance today. The book argues that Thoreau was drawn toward empirical, materialist and local, yet also holistic, cosmic and global understandings of nature and experience.

Henry David Thoreau's thinking about a number of ?issues - including the relationship between humans and other species, just responses to state violence, the threat posed to human freedom by industrial capitalism, and the essential relation between scientific 'facts' and poetic 'truths' - speaks to our historical moment as clearly as it did to the 'restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century' into which he was born. This volume, marking the two-hundredth anniversary of Thoreau's birth, gathers the threads of the contemporary, interdisciplinary conversation around this key figure in literary, political, philosophical, and environmental thought, uniting new essays by scholars who have shaped the field with chapters by emerging scholars investigating previously underexplored aspects of Thoreau's life, writings, and activities. Both a dispatch from the front lines of Thoreau scholarship and a vivid demonstration of Thoreau's relevance for twenty-first-century life and thought, Thoreau at 200 will be of interest for both Thoreau scholars and general readers.