Hiding Places: Thoreau’s Geographies

Abstract

For Henry David Thoreau, penetrating landscape observation provided an unfailing point of departure for natural description, ecstatic contemplation, and violently paradoxical social commentary. His texts express, question, naturalize, and deploy many presuppositions about geographic order in the landscape. His writing life, ending in 1862, spanned a time when teleological explanations of the landscape were challenged by the gradual “detheologization” of scientific thought. The new views on the ultimate geographic role of Providence all made some room for empirical, proximate explanations of geography’s grand theme: the fit between humanity and the earth. The effect of Thoreau’s development from transcendental idealism to a penetrating yet fussy empiricism was to dissolve the unity of the human and natural worlds. His odd, shifting, rhetorical appropriation of place, his resistance to unqualified generalization, and his purported aversion to travel (outside of Concord) all contrast with the path geography took during the second—Darwinian—half of the century. Because he was well informed about the science of his time and about Humboldt and Guyot in particular, and because his texts are rich literary contrivances, geographers may fruitfully examine his work in two ways: first, as a register of educated thought about landscape before geography's modern institutionalization as a discipline, and second, as a complex of written landscapes, inscribing and erasing places in varied ways, expressing the contradictions of early modernism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.