Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Science & Literature) [Paperback]

Laura Dassow Walls (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 1995 | Series: Science & Literature

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.
   

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An excellent book, well-written, even eloquent. Walls is clearly the first scholar to read Thoreau thoroughly in the context both of the science of his own day and of the theory and philosophy of science in our day, in such a way as profoundly to call into question all previous work in this area and to open up questions about the very nature of science and scientific truth.”—Robert Sattelmeyer, Georgia State University

About the Author

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

 

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (November 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299147444
• ISBN-13: 978-0299147440
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,827,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Walls opens windows to Thoreau's scientific world view!, June 20, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Science & Literature) (Paperback)

I first heard Laura Walls deliver the concepts contained in this volume at a recent annual meeting of the Thoreau Society. Her presentation was clear and direct, introducing the hearer to the historical personalities that influenced the platform upon which Thoreau based his world view. This book expands the same theme, for it fills in a great deal of minutia that had to be omitted from the ealier presentation. Seeing New Worlds is an important excursion into both the obvious and the subtle influences that shaped the late writings of Thoreau, such as Faith in a Seed, which only recently was made available to students of this enigmatic soul. Congratulations to Walls for a well researched intrusion into a complex mind.
Tom Potter

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars understanding the nature of HDT's understanding of nature, September 4, 2004

By 

Robert L. France (cambridge, ma United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Science & Literature) (Paperback)

Thisi is a very important and informative book that I continue to go back to since its first publication almost a decade ago. There is much to interest both the Thoreauvian scholar as well as student of natural history. As a practicing scientist and a editor of two books of Thoreau quotations, I found this work of Walls to be very helpful in increasing my own understanding of 19th century natural science/history. Indeed, I make reference to Walls' book in my own Profitably Soaked: Thoreau's Engagement With Water (Green Frigate Books, 2003).

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars inspiring!, October 29, 2001

By 

Kathie Butler (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Science & Literature) (Paperback)

I was so fascinated by Laura Dassow Walls' unique take on Thoreau that I was inspired to complete my own graduate work on Transcendentalism. Any student of Thoreau will appreciate this innovative look at the old master.