The concept of solitude has existed in stories and paintings, and in practice, for centuries. Looking at that history, as we do in this chapter, tells us a lot about the preconceptions we have about solitude today – who it’s for, is it positive or negative (or neither), and how we should undertake it. For better or worse, we also see and relate to solitude in part due to the way our various cultures treat it. The images we see and the stories we hear, both historical and contemporary, create chatter that affect how we think about the role solitude can and should have in our daily lives. Shedding light on biases and beliefs fed by historical narratives can help untangle why we approach solitude the way we do today, both as a society and as individuals.

This chapter focuses on the essays of Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller who used writing as a spiritual and philosophical tool. This special form of prose allowed them to write themselves, and thus Transcendentalism as a movement, into being, creating a flexible, open-ended, and experimental instrument for the radical self-fashioning of an emergent sensibility: the American individual as a freestanding soul, entire in (him)self, capable of encompassing all the potential of the cosmos. The resulting works forever stamped this most antinomian of genres with the Transcendentalist’s indelible signature. The chapter traces the movement back to Harvard College in the 1820s and ’30s, where students and faculty discussed spirituality, philosophy, and the art of writing. The chapter traces the influence of this convergence and of key figures like the Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing on the burgeoning movement. The chapter’s final pages highlight how central Transcendentalism has been to the American essay tradition, with writers today of greatly varying backgrounds absorbing its lessons and style into their own writing.

Climate is but one way to perceive forests. In our comparatively short time on Earth, we humans have forged an inextricable bond with forests. Trees have inspired human imagination for tens of thousands of years. Forests are central to the cultural evolution of humankind and have molded our beliefs and values and societies. Our world would be impoverished without forests. The forest-climate question was of much common knowledge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the scholars in the debate also opined on the aesthetics of trees and their contributions to the human experience. How we view forests, and how we value them, must be considered from a multifaceted standpoint that recognizes their many contributions to humanity and planet Earth, not just as public utilities that influence climate. The rationalism of science must be balanced with the romanticism of forests.

This chapter surveys the history of nature writing and the nature essay, from American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller to more recent writers such as Barry Lopez, Amitav Ghosh, and Camille T. Dungy. The author examines the political and scientific aspects of nature writing and the genre’s response to changing conceptions of “nature.”

In “Toward a Transatlantic Philosophy of Nature,” Samantha C. Harvey demonstrates how British Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge articulated a philosophy of nature in poetic form that would be reinterpreted in two central prose works of American Transcendentalism: Emerson’s Nature (1836) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854). Through detailed analysis of the works of Wordsworth and Emerson, Harvey suggests that nature’s vital role in the nineteenth century becomes particularly pronounced when Romanticism is considered as a transnational movement that flowed beyond national boundaries. Harvey shows how a transcendentalist philosophy of nature crossed, recrossed, and crisscrossed the Atlantic in various directions, undergoing continual transformations along the way.

In “Wilderness,” Debbie Lee traces the conceptual origins of wilderness writing to the “wildēors” (self-willed land) of ancient and medieval texts like Beowulf and to Indigenous place-based language and storytelling such as that of the Nimiipuu. In addition to tracing a history of the “wilderness movement” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the writings of authors like Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Muir, Lee also suggests an alternative history of wilderness rooted in social and environmental justice and expressed in Black and Indigenous literatures. Using examples from the works of Barry Lopez, Evelyn White, Gary Snyder, Toni Morrison, and Cecil Giscombe, among many others, Lee demonstrates the diversity and range of wilderness literature, arguing that we should think of “wilderness movements” in the plural.

The period from 1851 to 1877 is a critical transitional moment when ecology as a scientific field of study did not yet exist but was emerging. American scientists tended to rely on a Romantic science that prioritized nature’s organicism, but their criteria for empirical observation would lead to detailed and differentiated views that would help shape a modern ecology less insistent on holistic ideals and more open to incomplete and mutable forms in nature. For many writers, naturalists, and scientists, their approaches to nature were explicitly tied to considerations of the relationship between matter and spirit, and to the study of nature as a legible “book” whose material language, or littera, was inscribed everywhere as the environment and as forms of life.1 Scientific and cultural knowledge in this era shared an understanding that one could observe, that is, “read” nature. “Metaphor,” “type,” “translation,” and even “leaves” were objects of both biological and literary study. Through the sciences of this period, we can see how scientists interpreted nature as a literary text; and through the literature, how nature was read and written as a living thing.

This essay reads Lydia Maria Child and Henry David Thoreau against the grain of the usual literary taxonomies in order to consider the degree to which two key preoccupations animated their respective work: first, What constitutes a good life and how might people of limited or moderate means achieve it within a volatile and unforgiving US economy? And, second, How might individuals conceive of and act on their responsibilities to suffering others, especially enslaved Americans, and what should one’s disposition be toward injustice more generally? With attention to their overlapping inquiries into frugality, self-improvement, economic instability, and social injustice, I argue that Child and Thoreau are crucial authors for understanding both the mid-nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries.

This chapter intervenes in ongoing queer ecocritical debates about reproductive futurity by turning to Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with nurse insects and trees. It demonstrates how Thoreau dislocates biological reproduction in both space and time, urging us to attend to a broader range of participants – and a broader range of contributing actions – in our account of the reproductive process. Arguing that such a complex, multispecies understanding of reproduction distinguishes Thoreau from both contemporary environmentalists, whose rhetoric often relies on normative logics of reproductivity, and queer theorists, who often critique such logics, the chapter theorizes an environmental ethic informed by the extant queerness of reproduction itself. In contrast to the contemporary activist organization “Conceivable Future,” which helps women decide whether to have children in a time of climate catastrophe, such a reading of Thoreau offers possibilities for solidarity and social change that customary definitions of reproduction have rendered inconceivable.

This chapter argues for the rebirth of pastoral in the twenty-first century: as a genre responsive to climate change, mindful of the extinction of many species, and bearing the unique insights of indigenous peoples, with their memory of past catastrophes and their vision for a sustainable future. Woven into this argument are three classic American authors -- Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville – each preoccupied with the subjection of Native peoples, but imagining very different fates for them. In Irving, the ruthless ascendency of colonial settlers makes Native demise a foregone conclusion. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, tells a more conflicting story. In spite of the casual reference to the “extinction” of the Pequots, the persistence of Native characters throughout the novel suggests that they might be here to stay. It is Tashtego’s “red arm and hammer” that we see at the book’s climactic end. Thoreau also equivocates, at one point showing the Abenaki as more firmly ensconced in their habitat than he himself can ever be. In this way, he looks forward to the pastoral affirmation of indigenous survival in the philosophy of Kyle Powys Whyte, and the climate activism of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

This chapter on Henry David Thoreau puts in relief the ecological commons and historiography of nature that issue from the environmental relations illustrated by the sketch. Connecting Thoreau’s Cape Cod to his “Dispersion of Seeds,” the chapter describes these relations in terms of the dispersal that follows from waves rising and receding upon the shore and tossing up weeds, corpses, and all kinds of salvage materials left from shipwrecks. The sketch’s seeing—and enacting—of relation as a littoral erosion and disintegration presents an alternate sense of how one lives with, pressed up against, familiarly or strangely, other species and races. If a romantic ecology might envision relations in the form of an interconnected cobweb, Thoreau’s late manuscripts release those slight silky threads to the air and lets them fly apart and ray out prismatically. This chapter follows how Thoreau’s sketches embody the ways in which text becomes a natural history of casualty, attending to species and race, and engaging with them by way of an environmental optics. The tenuous lines of sight draw a partial ecology that stretches and cleaves the liminalities between “nature” and Thoreau’s “I,” even as it disperses those very entities.

Chapter 9 gives attention to some of the voices and groups that were often excluded during the founding period. From the destitute dreams of a complete make-over of property laws, to individuals mistrusting all governments, to Native Americans, to women, and—last but not least—African Americans; what was their place and role in the body politic? The chapter includes selections from Thomas Skidmore’s The Rights of Men; from the American Transcendentalists; from speeches by Native Americans, including Tecumseh and Pushmataha; and from the early nineteenth-century women’s rights movement as represented by Abigail Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft, who as widely read among American women, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The arguments of these authors reveal inherent tensions between the liberal and the republican view of society, i.e., between the idea of fundamental equality of all individuals, regardless of their race, gender, or beliefs, and the classical republican recognition of diversity among members of society. The chapter thus raises questions about the relative merit of abstract and descriptive representation.