The nineteen essays in this challenging volume address central questions in Thoreau studies today. With a foreword by Lawrence Buell. Contents: Believing in Nature: Wilderness and Wildness in Thoreauvian Science / Laura Dassow Walls; Thoreau's Transcendental Ecocentrism / William Rossi; "Climate Does Thus React on Man:" Wildness and Geographic Determinism in Thoreau's "Walking" / Richard J. Schneider; "In Search of a More Human Nature:" Wendell Berry's Revision of Thoreau's Experiment / Ted Olson; Water-Signs: Place and Metaphor in Dillard and Thoreau / James A. Papa, Jr.; The Written World: Place and History in Thoreau's "A Walk to Wachusett" / David M. Robinson; Thoreau, Thomas Cole, and Asher Durand: Composing the American Landscape / Isaiah Smithson; Reading Home: Thoreau, Literature, and the Phenomenon of Inhabitation / Peter Blakemore; Seeing the West Side of Any Mountain: Thoreau and Contemporary Ecological Poety / J. Scott Bryson; Ten Ways of Seeing Landscapes in Walden and Beyond / James G. McGrath; Sauntering in the Industrial Wilderness / Bernard W. Quetchenbach; Walden, Rural Hours, and the Dilemma of Representation / Rochelle Johnson; Wordsworth and Thoreau: Two Versions of Pastoral / Greg Garrard; Humanity as "Part and Parcel of Nature:" A Comparative Study of Thoreau's and Taoist Concepts of Nature / Aimin Cheng; Speaking for Nature: Thoreau and the "Problem" of "Nature Writing" / Nancy Craig Simmons; Depopulation, Deforestation, and the Actual Walden Pond / Robert Sattelmeyer; Skirting Lowell: The Exceptional Work of Nature in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Stephen Germic; Rustling Thoreau's Cattle: Wildness and Domesticity in "Walking" / Barbara "Barney" Nelson; Counter Frictions: Writing and Activism in the Work of Abbey and Thoreau / Susan M. Lucas.
University of Iowa Press, 2000. 340 pp. Paperback.