Lewis Hyde

View Larger
Image

The Essays of Henry David Thoreau

Lewis Hyde; Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau's major essays annotated and introduced by one of our most vital intellectuals.
With The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror.
Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political world, and "Slavery in Massachusetts" ends with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River.
Thoreau's ideal reader was expected to be well versed in Greek and Latin, poetry and travel narrative, and politically engaged in current affairs. Hyde's detailed annotations clarify many of Thoreau's references and re-create the contemporary context wherein the nation's westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau

Lewis Hyde; Henry D. Thoreau

Thoreau's major essays annotated and introduced by one of our most vital intellectuals.
With The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror.
Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political world, and "Slavery in Massachusetts" ends with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River.
Thoreau's ideal reader was expected to be well versed in Greek and Latin, poetry and travel narrative, and politically engaged in current affairs. Hyde's detailed annotations clarify many of Thoreau's references and re-create the contemporary context wherein the nation's westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Lee Mingwei: The Living Room

Lewis Hyde; Jennifer R. Gross; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Mingwei Lee

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

Lewis Hyde

Trickster Makes This World solidifies Lewis Hyde's reputation as, in Robert Bly's words, "the most subtle, thorough, and brilliant mythologist we now have". In it Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of the human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first revisits the old stories -- Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, etc. -- and then holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, and Frederick Douglass. Authoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its style, Trickster Makes This World ranks among the great works of modern cultural criticism.

More About this Book

Other editions: Hardcover - 1998

View Larger
Image

This Error Is the Sign of Love

Lewis Hyde

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking

Lewis Hyde

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

Lewis Hyde

Discusses the argument that a work of art is essentially a gift and not a commodity.

More About this Book

Other editions: 1983

World Alone: Mundo a Solas

Lewis Hyde; Vicente Aleixandre; David Unger

More About this Book

A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre

Lewis Hyde; Vicente Aleixandre

More About this Book