Description

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The Maine Woods, vast and largely unsettled, are often described as unchanged since Henry David Thoreau's journeys across the backcountry, in spite of the realities of Indian dispossession and the visible signs of logging, settlement, tourism, and real estate development. In the summer of 2014 scholars, activists, members of the Penobscot Nation, and other individuals retraced Thoreau's route.

Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later.

Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.

About the Author

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JOHN J. KUCICH is professor of English and coordinator for the Center for Sustainability at Bridgewater State University. He is author of Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.

Praise For…

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"No comparable collection—multidisciplinary, multivocal, inclusive of tribal as well as settler perspectives, academic and nonacademic perspectives—exists. In this respect as well as through its in-depth focus on The Maine Woods, a work almost never considered in its entirety, this collection opens a new dimension to the study of Thoreau's writings."—William Rossi, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings

"This volume illuminates the interweaving of landscape and human history, of cultural change and nature's alteration, and of literature, philosophy, and the physical world. Like Thoreau's writings, these essays invite a deeper consideration of the interrelated meanings of words, histories, and place."—Rochelle L. Johnson, author of Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics of Alienation

"With Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land, editor and scholar John J. Kucich has assembled a collection of essays worthy the complexity of Thoreau's sum of experiences and the composite richness of northern Maine."—Thoreau Society Bulletin