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“The American Myth”: Paradise (to be) Regained

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frederic I. Carpenter
Frederic I. Carpenter*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 4
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Extract

The search for some single myth or hypothesis to explain American character and history has informed much of our recent criticism. Within the last decade at least seven authors have devoted complete books to the subject. And from Emerson's “American Scholar” of a century ago, through Turner's “Significance of the Frontier,” to Matthiessen's American Renaissance, earlier critics had invoked the myth in passing. But now the old, vague “myth of the common man” has been imagined more concretely and in greater detail.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 5 , December 1959 , pp. 599 - 606
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959

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References

1 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass., 1950); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1955); Leslie A. Fiedler, An End To Innocence (Boston, 1955); Robert E. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature (New York, 1955); Frederic I. Carpenter, American Literature and the Dream (New York, 1955); Kenneth S. Lynn, The Dream of Success (Boston, 1955); Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (New York, 1957).

2 See especially F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), “The Need for Mythology,” pp. 626–631.

3 Virgin Land, p. 259.

4 Quoted from Thoreau, Works, xi, 410, by Leo Stoller, “Thoreau's Doctrine of Simplicity,” N.E.Q., xxix (Dec. 1956), 457. See also Leo Stoller, After Walden (Stanford, 1957).

5 F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York, 1944), p. 69.

6 Perry Miller, “The Shaping of the American Character,” N.E.Q., xxviii (Dec. 1955), 435–454.

7 A. O. Lovejoy and G. A. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935) (see bibliography on p. x); and Lois A. Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the 18th Century (Baltimore, 1934), foreword by A. 0. Lovejoy.

8 Irving Babbitt, On Being Creative (Boston, 1932), pp. v, xi.

9 R. W. B. Lewis, “Hero in the New World,” Kenyan Renew, xiii (Autumn 1951), 641–660.

10 Carvel Collins, “Are These Mandatas?” Literature and Psychology, iii (1953), 3–6.