Edenic

Thus, when Paul and Billy turn to the Edenic archetype, one must not view this as an acceptance of the "truth" of the Judeo-Christian tradition from which this myth is borrowed.

To the extent that an abstract Edenic landscape crowds out the teenage rubber tapper in a faded World Cup T-shirt, the stinging smoke of factories in a treeless city ringed by forest, or the lone plant sprouting in the cracks of a sunbaked roof, it impoverishes our vision of Amazonia, as well as of a larger natural world that demands not just to be respected but, first of all, to be rethought.

Our understanding of the Edenic motif in American fiction stems largely from its articulation by three primary critics — R.W.B. Lewis, Leslie Fiedler, and D. H. Lawrence.

But we need not try to re-create these circumstances, any more than the Sabbath celebration of an Edenic world means that celebrants must go naked and picnic in a garden; we need only make it a happy and special meal.

Then there are the Edenics, who exclude all cooked food; the Wallacites, who abhor salt and refuse bread containing yeast; the Haigites, who do not include peas or beans in their vegetarianism; and the Allinsonians, who abandoned tea in favor of a solution of dried cereals.

The Edenics wrote historical novels that place the belle in an antebellum setting, perpetuate the notion that she is an ideal woman, and, most important, present her as a symbol for the lost Garden of the antebellum South.

Let all that have an ear hear and all that have an eye see, the Edenic will not be denied!

Like Jack London (or Theodore Roosevelt, for that matter, or Owen Wister, Frank Norris, and an entire generation of young men of the late nineteenth century, enamored simultaneously of the frontier and the establishment), Burroughs wanted money, power, and status as well as release into an imagined edenic frontier.

It is key that her one and only intimate relationship, with Janet, is recalled in memories of play that enact an edenic maternal world and a vaginal space: Janet. Irma. Playing house together in the apple-trees back of the barn.

If I lived them at a most unoriginal level of elation—and I very much doubt that my edenic content was very different from that of most other brides ... If I lived them in an unremarkable delight, I also lived them consumed in unremarkable occupations.