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Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England

Online ISBN:
9780199382415
Print ISBN:
9780199998142
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England

Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Zachary McLeod Hutchins

Assistant Professor of English

Colorado State University
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Published online:
19 June 2014
Published in print:
24 July 2014
Online ISBN:
9780199382415
Print ISBN:
9780199998142
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Inventing Eden builds on recent environmental criticism to chart the ways in which colonial New England writers replaced their initial topographical optimism with an interest in recovering the somatic, intellectual, spiritual, and social perfections that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the biblical Garden. As they appropriated and adapted Old World beliefs about the primitive Eden and a coming millennial paradise to their New World surroundings over the first two centuries of European colonization in New England, Puritans and Quakers disciplined their physical and figurative bodies in an effort to reclaim a prelapsarian physiological temperance. Previous scholars have noted that colonists described New World landscapes as edenic, but Inventing Eden uncovers the relationship between the New England interest in paradise and many of the iconic intellectual artifacts and social movements of colonial North America. The Bay Psalm Book, Quaker grammar, and Harvard Yard are products of this seventeenth-century desire for edenic purity; so, too, is the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the judicial decision that abolished slavery in Massachusetts. Progressing chronologically and thematically, the individual chapters of Inventing Eden trace the transatlantic development of edenic thought from the works of English authors such as Francis Bacon, George Herbert, and John Milton to the increasingly American writings of Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, and Benjamin Franklin, among others.

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