“As You Are Brothers of Mine”: Thoreau and the Irish

Walls, Laura Dassow

doi:10.1162/TNEQ_a_00434

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March 01 2015

“As You Are Brothers of Mine”: Thoreau and the Irish

Laura Dassow Walls

Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature and science. She has published extensively on Thoreau and Emerson, and her most recent book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America(University of Chicago Press, 2009), received the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American History and the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Currently she is at work on a comprehensive biography of Henry David Thoreau.

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Laura Dassow Walls

Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature and science. She has published extensively on Thoreau and Emerson, and her most recent book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America(University of Chicago Press, 2009), received the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American History and the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Currently she is at work on a comprehensive biography of Henry David Thoreau.

Online ISSN: 1937-2213

Print ISSN: 0028-4866

2015

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The New England Quarterly (2015) 88 (1): 5–36.

https://doi.org/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00434

Abstract

Did Thoreau really hate the Irish? No, but he did hate seeing his Irish neighbors buying into Yankee consumerism. While Irish wage-slavery becomes the crisis of Walden, elsewhere Thoreau admires and envies the Irish, figures for redemption: his quarrel with them becomes a quarrel with himself, then a quarrel with America.

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2015

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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