Recently, ‘ecocritics’ have tried to show how literature might help us weather the global environmental crisis both emotionally and intellectually. Their arguments have been based, in part, on the assumption that despite its obvious strengths natural science has well-defined intellectual and ethical ‘limits’, and that environmental values are (therefore) best articulated by concerned humanists more in touch with the imagination. This essay addresses some of the problems faced by green humanists in their uneasy, mistrustful relationship with natural science, using passages from Thoreau as touchstone texts and juxtaposing those passages with remarks made by Bachelard, Coleridge, Stevens, Nietzsche, and Kant.
BachelardGaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press
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BerleantArnold. 2004. ‘The Aesthetics of Art and Nature‘, in CarlsonAllen and BerleantArnold (eds.). The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Toronto: Broadview Press), pp. 76–88.
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BradyEmily. 2003. Aesthetics of the Natural Environment. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama.
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BradyEmily. 2004. ‘Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, in CarlsonAllen and BerleantArnold (eds.). The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Toronto: Broadview Press), pp. 156–69.
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BuellLawrence. 1994. The Environmental Imagination; Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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EagletonTerry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell.
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EmersonRalph Waldo1983. ‘Nature’, in PorteJoel (ed), Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America), pp. 5–49.
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FerryLuc. 1993. Homo Aestheticus; The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. de LoanaRobert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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KantImmanuel. 2005. The Critique of Judgment, trans. BernardJ.H.New York: Barnes and Noble.
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LuedersEdward (ed.). 1989. Writing Natural History: Dialogues with Authors. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
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MarshakStephen. 2001. Earth: Portrait of a Planet. New York: W.W. Norton.
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NietzscheFriedrich. 1968. The Will to Power, ed. KaufmanWalter, trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage.
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PorteJoel. 1966. Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict. Middlesex, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.
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ScheeseDon. 1996. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. New York: Twayne Publishers.
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ShumwayDavid. 2005. ‘Cultural Studies and Questions of Pleasure and Value’, in BérubéMichael (ed.), The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 103–16.
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StevensWallace. 1982. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books.
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StevensWallace. 1951. The Necessary Angel; Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage.
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StewartFrank. 1995. A Natural History of Nature Writing. Washington, DC: Island Press.
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ThoreauHenry David1958. The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. WalterHarding and CarlBode. New York: New York University Press.
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ThoreauHenry David1984a. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. III, ed. TorreyBradford and AllenFrancis H.. Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith.
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ThoreauHenry David. 1984b. ‘Walking’, in SattelmeyerRobert (ed.), The Natural History Essays (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith), pp. 93–136.
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