ソロー生誕200周年を記念して、日本ソロー学会が企画した英文論集。ソロー（及びエマソン、ホーソーン、ディキンスンら19世紀のアメリカ文学の作家・詩人たち）が、21世紀の現代世界において、今なおいかにアクチュアルな問題を提起しているか、19名の研究者が新たな視点で考察する。日本に生きる者としての視点も交えて、文学研究の成果を発信する刺激的な書。

目次

Introduction (Masaki Horiuchi)

Part I Political Perspectives
“Civil Disobedience” in the Nuclear Age:
Thoreau and Solnit’s “Journey into the Hidden Wars
of the American West”
(Shoko Itoh)
Water Vein of Useful Ignorance:
Henry David Thoreau’s Anti-Intellectualism
(Takao Yamaguchi)
The Maine Woods:
What Thoreau Learned about the Penobscot People
(Namie Ozawa)
Native American Representations in the Works of
Thoreau and Irving
(Mika Takiguchi)
Dickinson, Thoreau, and John Brown:
The Voice of the Voiceless
(Junko Kanazawa)
Anne Waldman and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience
(Ayako Takahashi)
Civil Disobedience and the Postwar Okinawan Novelist
Medoruma Shun
(Yohei Yamamoto)
Emerson’s Circles and Publishing:
Character and Print Culture
in Nineteenth-Century American National Literature
(Mikayo Sakuma)
Modernity of Louisa May Alcott’s Unpublished Manuscript
“Pogram’s Lay-vice”
(Asako Motooka)

Part II Philosophical Perspectives
Thoreau’s Walden and the Evolution of Resistance
(Mikako Takeuchi)
Thoreau’s Ontology of “We”:
Friendship in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(Maki Sadahiro)
Thoreau’s Expression of Heaven or the Universe in Walden
(Kazuto Ono)
Thoreau’s Views on Growth in Relation to Flora:
With Comparative Reference to Kumagusu Minakata
(Michiko Ono)
“Silence Was Audible”:
Views on Music in the Works of Dwight, Thoreau
and The Blithedale Romance
(Fumiko Takeno)
Emerson and Thoreau as Writers
in Hawthorne’s Autobiographical Sketch, “The Old Manse”
(Atsuko Oda)
Paradoxical Truth in Emerson and Thoreau
(Izumi Ogura)
Thoreau and Muir:
A Glance at the Shifting American Sense of Nature
(Yoshiko Fujita)
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Daisetsu Suzuki:
A Comparative Investigation on their Views of
Nature, Mind, and Language
(Yoshio Takanashi)
Uses of the Early Emerson in the Present Age
(Masaki Horiuchi)