Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature [Hardcover]

OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.Ecocriticism and Crisis Ecocriticism and Determination Materialism and Transcendentalism Class Conflict in New England Nathaniel Hawthorne's Democracy William Wordsworth in New England Utopia Revisited The Discipline of Nature William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau as Poet Orestes Brownson's Democracy William Wordsworth and Ecocriticism Radical Transcendentalism Reformers and Scholars The Moral Geography of Walden Brook Farm and Association Walden and Association The Law of Organic Regeneration Thoreau and Ecocriticism Margaret Fuller and the Condition of America Margaret Fuller's Vision Marxism and Nature The Discipline of History

In this brilliant and urgent book, Newman clears away the cobwebs to reintroduce us to our radical contemporary: Thoreau. - Mike Davis, University of California, Irvine

In a style at once meticulous and dramatic, Lance Newman situates American literary Romanticism in the context of working-class radicalism, political and social reform, and incipient environmentalism. By exhorting readers to pay attention to the material conditions that determine the creation of literature, Newman provides an elaborate cautionary demonstration for scholars - and, in particular, for ecocritics - l£z