Walking in the Wilderness

The Peripatetic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Painting


1. Edition, 2006
304 Pages

ISBN: 978-3-8253-5196-0
Product: Book
Edition: Hardcover
Subject: Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Series: American Studies – A Monograph Series, Volume No.: 134
Available: 22.06.2006

Keywords: USA, Literatur, Wandern (Motiv), Wildnis (Motiv), Geschichte 1800-1900, Thoreau, Henry David, Ikonographie, Landschaftsmalerei, Landschaft, amerikanische Literatur


This book investigates the adaptation and transformation of the European peripatetic tradition in nineteenth-century America; in particular Henry David Thoreau’s literary walks and their visual counterparts in American landscape painting. Although Thoreau’s perambulations in New World nature have been stated in scholarship, no study has offered a comparative analysis, nor has the philosophic-contemplative aspect of his 'art of Walking” been sufficiently studied. The present study puts his walking pattern into a transatlantic as well as interdisciplinary context and illuminates the uniquely American aesthetic-philosophic considerations underlying the genre of the walk in American nineteenth-century literature and painting.

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Naomi Ossar in: Kritikon Litterarum, 35 (2008), Heft 1/2, 95ff

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Christian Moser in: Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, Bd. 245, Jg. 160 (1/2008), 188ff

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Joanna Durczak in: Anglistik, 19.1 (2008), 215ff