Metaphorical Construals of Nature in Thoreau’s Writings

The article investigates how the concept of nature is metaphorically construed in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, one of the earliest and most influential nature writers. The analysis has been inspired by insights from cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics, especially Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory. Several different metaphorical construals of the concept of nature appear in Thoreau’s writings which have been examined in this study, including Walden, The Maine Woods, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a selection from his journal, and two collections of his earlier and later natural history essays and manuscripts. One can encounter there, obviously, conventional personifications of nature, such as Mother Nature, which, however, is questioned by Thoreau, as well as the occasional construal of nature as a companion or a bride. Other conventional conceptual metaphors, which are more frequently employed by him, include the metaphorical construal of nature as a work of art or as a literary work and once, more unconventionally, as a concert. Natural entities are also construed as other kinds of products. An original metaphor, which frequently appears in Thoreau’s late manuscript on the dispersion of seeds, is the personification of nature as a forester.

“Henry's brilliant sister”: The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother's Posthumous Publications

Ever since the publication of Henry Thoreau's four posthumous essay collections, bibliographers and biographers have credited Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the case of Excursions (1863), or William Ellery Channing, in the case of The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866), with either editing the collections or co-editing them with Sophia Thoreau, Henry's younger sister. This essay provides evidence from letters, books, diaries, and articles, as well as from the essay manuscripts themselves, that Sophia Thoreau alone edited her brother's essay collections for publication after his death from tuberculosis in 1862. She alone also chose the editor for her brother's Journal before her death in 1876.