Description
Book SynopsisOffers a critical attempt to restore the fundamental role that religious experience could play in shaping nineteenth-century American approaches to natural space. Devin Zuber illuminates the complex dynamic unfolded between the religious, the literary, and the ecological.
Trade ReviewA Language of Things represents an important contribution to our understanding of American culture, religious history, and environmental history. It offers a searching, thoroughly researched explanation of how and why Emanuel Swedenborg and his followers helped to spark that Romantic re-enchantment of the natural world championed by nineteenth-century figures such as John Chapman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, sustained as well by later figures such as John Muir and Sarah Orne Jewett.
An engaging, enlightening, and much needed examination of the influence of Swedenborg's ideas on prominent environmental thinkers and writers.
