Finding Words for Nature: Reading Thoreau

Abstract

Alma Natura, Ars Severa: Expanses & Limits of Craft in Henry David Thoreau, is the published doctoral dissertation of Swedish scholar Henrik Otterberg (formerly Gustafsson), comprising a notable introduction and six previously published, peer-vetted essays: four articles from the Thoreau Society journal The Concord Saunterer, one from SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, and a chapter from the 2013 collection Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon (University of Georgia Press). Overtaxed readers are advised to find time for this book, a penetrating and far-reaching study of major Thoreauvian concerns. Although this work has an as yet limited distribution, it deserves a wide readership both as an important contribution to the transatlantic dialogue on Thoreau and as an elegantly argued, richly allusive study simply too good to be overlooked. In his 60-page “Introduction” Otterberg examines the backgrounds, connections, and implications of his more than 15-year project, and he creates a matrix, both containing and informing, within which the separate essays coalesce. By no means a full summary, this review engages selected points from each chapter to suggest the emerging nexus.