A Language of Things

Emanuel Swedenborg, the Scandinavian naturalist, mystic, philosopher, and author of Opera Philosophica et Mineralia (Philosophical and logical works, 1734), figures in this study as a pioneer in environmental thought. Specifically, this book argues that Swedenborg's visionary theology ... came to operate as an agent of reenchantment for a group of American authors and artists who are associated with the appearance of an environmental imagination in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (p. 4) Perhaps most notably, Swedenborg is credited here with inspiring some of the “proto-ecological ideas that streamed out of Concord Transcendentalism” and filtered into the thinking of subsequent ecologically aware writers (ibid.). Long underestimated for his influence on American environmental thought, Swedenborg was admired by the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, the local colorist Sarah Orne Jewett, the nature writer John Muir, the poets Sampson Reed, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman, and the folk

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Mysticism · Naturalism · Opera · American Environmental and Regional History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies · Philosophy