Review: Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, by Caleb Smith

Book Review| June 01 2024 Review: Thoreau's Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, by Caleb Smith Caleb Smith, Thoreau's Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. ix + 240. $32. Andrew McMurry Andrew McMurry University of Waterloo Andrew McMurry is a Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. He has published widely on ecocriticism and environmental discourse. His books are Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature (University of Georgia Press, 2003) and Entertaining Futility: Despair and Hope in the Time of Climate Change (Texas A&M University Press, 2018). A recent essay, "Standing Up to Trump, with Thoreau," was published in Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: Uses and Abuses of an American Icon (edited by Kristen Case, Rochelle Johnson, and Henrik Otterberg; Brill, 2021). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) 79 (1): 73–78. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.79.1.73 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Andrew McMurry; Review: Thoreau's Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, by Caleb Smith. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 June 2024; 79 (1): 73–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2024.79.1.73 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search In Thoreau's Axe, Caleb Smith explores the vagaries of attention and distraction in nineteenth-century America. Weak attention—in schools, in prisons, in churches, and in the workplace—was mostly understood as a problem, an obstacle, even a sin, requiring reeducation, punishment, moral reform, and rehabilitation. Smith's unusual inquiry consists of a series of his reflections on short textual excerpts drawn from an eclectic range of writers who directly or glancingly consider the challenges of inculcating attention and overcoming distraction. In addition to Thoreau himself, we find Poe, Whitman, Melville, Douglass, Dickinson, Elizabeth Peabody, and William James, among other well-known writers and thinkers. But we also learn of lesser figures—preachers and teachers for the most part—many of whom are all-but forgotten or ideologically sidelined. In addition to sorting out some of his long-standing questions about the period's spirit of therapeutic self care and regulation, Smith finds in the work of these early... You do not currently have access to this content.