(Download) "Thoreau's Materialism: From Walden to Wild Fruits." by Nineteenth-Century Prose " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

June 10, 2021

eBook details

Title: Thoreau's Materialism: From Walden to Wild Fruits.
Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
Release Date : January 22, 2004
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 227 KB

Description

During the 1850s, Thoreau increasingly engaged in participatory observation of nature. At the same time, he became increasingly radical in his political beliefs. These concurrent developments were closely related manifestations of an underlying trend of increasing commitment to a materialist understanding of the ecosocial world, of human society in nature. Walden is a transitional text; it articulates a materialist analysis of capitalist social relations and the moral effects of the market and competition, but it offers an idealist response, centered on individual self-reform, to that clearly drawn problem. Wild Fruits, the guide book Thoreau left in manuscript, offers a second answer to the same problem. Wild Fruits is an almanac with a communal subject, which focuses on collective experience of endemic New England plants that produce edible fruits. The book argues that commerce and private property limit access to the wild, alienating urbanites and the poor from fulfilling relationships with nature. In response, the book convokes a utopian democratic community, bound together by the collective devotional exercise of gathering and eating wild fruits. The book concludes with a call for collective direct action to protect tracts of wild land by holding them as "a common possession forever." **********