This chapter examines the tendency of readers of Thoreau’s 1864 book “The Maine Woods” to read the landscape through which Thoreau travels as pristine wilderness. I argue, by contrast, that Thoreau presented a social landscape, a “working-forest” avant-la-lettre.

This essay surveys Thoreau’s antislavery writings from across his career and demonstrates the ecological concerns central to Thoreau’s abolitionist commitment.

Well known for his contrarian and solitary posture, Henry David Thoreau was nonetheless deeply responsive to the world around him. Tracing a wide range of geographic, intellectual, cultural, political, and scientific contexts, this volume brings together leading scholars of Thoreau and nineteenth-century American literature and culture who provide…[Read more]

This chapter explores Thoreau’s engagement with Free Soil ideology and contextualizes Thoreau’s ecologically oriented social reform. Thoreau, I argue, transforms the Free Soil position that slaveholding degrades labor and landscapes, making it more attentive to Transcendentalist ethics and ecological volatility. More specifically, the eco…[Read more]

This essay addresses the ecological valences within Thoreau’s political writings, arguing specifically that his antislavery essays, from the beginning of his abolitionist commitment, reflect a concern that slavery is an environmental problem best addressed through an ecologically inflected protest.

This essay situates “The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave” within the political context of the antislavery Free Soil movement, arguing that Bibb’s representations of land and labor reflect the concerns of Free Soil. In particular, it argues that Bibb’s narrative simultaneously critiques Free Soil ideology for…[Read more]

This essay argues that Thoreau witnesses a series of clashes across the three essays collected in “The Maine Woods” and that Thoreau positions himself with a variety of contact zones, enabling him both to navigate the landscapes of northern Maine and recount his experiences to his audiences.