An edition of The environmental imagination (1995)

The environmental imagination

Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture

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Last edited by MARC Bot
July 16, 2024 | History
An edition of The environmental imagination (1995)

The environmental imagination

Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture

  • 11 Want to read
  • 1 Currently reading

With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment.

With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.

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The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present.

In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization.

Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for the reading of American nature writing.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
586

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: The Environmental Imagination
The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture
September 1, 1996, Belknap Press
Paperback in English
Cover of: The environmental imagination
The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture
1995, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
in English
Cover of: The environmental imagination

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Published in
Cambridge, MA

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
818/.309
Library of Congress
PS3057.N3 B84 1995, PS3057.N3B84 1995

The Physical Object

Pagination
586 p. :
Number of pages
586

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL1106140M
Internet Archive
environmentalima0000buel
ISBN 10
0674258614
LCCN
94031321
OCLC/WorldCat
31044924
Library Thing
68714
Goodreads
1110982

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History

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July 16, 2024 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
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September 13, 2020 Edited by Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten person
December 10, 2009 Created by WorkBot add works page