Zachary McLeod Hutchins. Inventing Eden

European conceptions of the New World as a place of unbounded possibilities, a landscape on which humankind could regain lost innocence and acquire knowledge and new experience, have been long and widely explored. In studies of America, familiar themes resonate: as a paradise, as in R. W. B. Lewis’s classic The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955); as a “wilderness,” as told by Roderick Frazier Nash in Wilderness and the American Mind (1967); as a place to realize primitivist, millennial aspirations, religious, utopian, or otherwise, as seen in studies by Theodore Dwight Bozeman and Richard T. Hughes; as a promotional object, an encapsulation of desires and dreams to entice settlers, as E. Brooks Holifield observes in Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture, 1521–1680 (1989); and as a site to find untold wealth. Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England brings these and other themes together, to show how a range of early American texts, artifacts, and movements actually relate to the goal of getting—to quote another, more musical storyteller of the American search for Eden—“back to the garden” (189).

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Garden of Eden · Innocence · Literature · Paradise · Psychoanalysis · Tragedy (event) · Wilderness · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies