https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1346202
https://doi.org/10.60056/Lit.2025.34.156-185
American Nature Writing: Henry David Thoreau and “Green Thinking” in Literature
Albena Bakratcheva
This article focuses on the most intensive and, respectively, most productive last decade of Henry David Thoreau’s writerly/intellectual life when the environmental awareness declared in all his work – essays, Journal, his last two full-length books – becomes more and more thorough and emphatical. Dealing with major late essays such as “Walking,” “Autumnal Tints,” and “Wild Apples,” as well as with Thoreau’s late books “Cape Cod” and “The Maine Woods”, the article underscores the nuances in Thoreau’s mature and already overtly ecocentrical thinking, thus pointing up the masterly beginning of American “green writing” – this specifically American tradition of nature writing the study of which laid the foundations of US ecocriticism.
Keywords: Nature Writing; Environmental Awareness; Ecocentrism; Ecocriticism; American Transcendetalism/Romanticism; New England
About the author: Albena Bakratcheva is a Full Professor of American Literature at New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria, and Chair of the Graduate Program in American Studies. She has written various books and essays on nineteenth-century American literature, including “The Call of the Green. Thoreau and Place-Sense in American Writing” (2009, rept. 2017) and “Visibility Beyond the Visible. The Poetic Discourse of American Transcendentalism” (2013), and has translated Henry D. Thoreau’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, and Margaret Fuller’s major works in Bulgarian. She has been a Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the FU, Berlin, a Fulbright Scholar at the State University of New York, a USIA Fellow at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, and a Fulbright Research at Harvard University Scholar Albena Bakratcheva is a member of the Thoreau Society, USA, the Margaret Fuller Society, USA, and a founding member of IASA, the International American Studies Association. In 2014, in Concord, MA, the Thoreau Society gave her the Walter Harding Distinguished Service Award. In 2024 she received the National Award for Excellence in Literary Translation for her entire work as translator of seminal works of American literature and philosophy in Bulgarian and was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard.
