{"product_id":"seeing-new-worlds","title":"Seeing New Worlds","description":"Thoreau was a poet, a naturalist, a major American writer. Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWalls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau’s day deeply influenced his best work, from \u003ci\u003eWalden\u003c\/i\u003e to the \u003ci\u003eJournal\u003c\/i\u003e to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the “two cultures” we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific approach resulted in not only his “marriage” of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his “The Dispersion of Seeds” since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of \u003ci\u003eOrigin of Species\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, “organic” Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau’s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, \u003ci\u003eSeeing New Worlds\u003c\/i\u003e bridges today’s “two cultures” in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature.","brand":"University of Wisconsin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55554984182104,"sku":"9780299147440","price":21.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780299147440_d0494968-058e-46ae-ad6a-aac57283b850.jpg?v=1777987857","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/seeing-new-worlds","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}