The Wild and the Own. Nature and the Question of Property in Wordsworth and Thoreau

Drawing from John Locke's classical rendition of private property as an extension of man, the paper will explore the critiques of the ideas of property and ownership in the writings of William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau. In the paper, on the examples of Wordsworth's "The Excursion"" and "The Prelude" which I read against Thoreau's essay "Walking" I point to the ways in which, due to the different geographical, political, and historical contexts, the two writers' attitudes to property, though critical, were formulated as in fact two diverse projects not only as regards the degree of radicalism, but also as regards the purposes of the criticism and its social consequences. Juxtaposing two 19th-century territories, the post-enclosure England and the still open-spaced America, I show the ways in which the two writers approached nature and wildness as spheres free from ownership and thus open to explorations which, in the case of Wordsworth, lead to something which may be called mental or spiritual re-appropriation. In Thoreau, the explorations of the wild are freed from the desire to possess and thus promise an alternative "economy of living".