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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
It was alfred frankenstein, I believe, who first observed that the characteristic subjects of painters like William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham were visual counterparts of that “American Adam in Eden” theme, which many historians of literature had identified as “the central myth in the American novel since 1830”. Man unspoiled, in a new relationship to nature, is their common concern. As David W. Noble has written in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden:
The American novelist then, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper, cannot write within the traditional conventions of his European contemporaries. He is precluded by his nation's romantic self-image from being an analyst of social and individual comedy or tragedy. Our novelist must be a metaphysician and theologian. He must always begin with the question: is it possible that Americans are exempt from the human condition? Is it possible that men in the new world have escaped from the need to live within community, within a framework of institutions and traditions—have escaped even from the need to live within a mortal body, or a soul that is divided against itself? Can nature indeed redeem man, heal his spiritual division, and lift him above the constraints of social class?
1. Noble, David W., The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (New York: George Braziller, 1968)Google Scholar, and Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955).Google Scholar
2. Noble, , The Eternal Adam, p. 5Google Scholar
3. These sequences have been published by Nostalgia Press, New York, under the title Thimble Theatre: An Original Compilation—First Collection of the Rare Daily Strips in Which Popeye Appears for the First Time; Complete Run from 1928 to 1930 (1973, Bill Blackbeard, ed.).Google Scholar
4. For example, in Dobson, R. H. B. and Taylor, J., Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1976)Google Scholar: “The perennial appeal of the Robin Hood legend throughout the last five centuries is by any standards one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the social as well as literary history of England. As yet, and somewhat regrettably, the development of that legend since the end of the middle ages has received much less attention than its medieval origins. (Ritson, Joseph's notes to his Robin Hood [1795Google Scholar and later editions] still remain unsurpassed as a guide to the Robin Hood legend in the early modern period …). … Ritson made Robin Hood … intellectually as well as socially respectable for the first time in his long history. … Ritson was the first writer to convert Robin Hood into a thoroughgoing ideological hero, a repository for his own extremely complex and at times idiosyncratic revolutionary opinions. For Ritson Robin Hood was ‘a man who, in a barbarous age, and under a complicated tyranny, displayed a spirit of freedom and independence which has endeared him to the common people [&c &c]. …’ The sentiments here are of. course those of the French Revolution (Ritson was one of the few Englishmen to adopt the French revolutionary calendar) and more specifically, of Tom Paine. Only three years before the publication of Ritson, 's Robin HoodGoogle Scholar, Paine had converted another famous medieval English rebel, Wat Tyler, into a revolutionary hero in exactly the same manner (‘their fame will outlive their falsehood’)” (pp. 36, 37, 55, 56).Google Scholar
5. Translation from Short, Robert L.'s A Time to Be Born—a Time to Die (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)Google Scholar, a pictorial study of Ecclesiastes.
