NATURE AND CULTURE by Barbara Novak; Oxford; 323 pages; $35 ft
"In the beginning all the world was America." John Locke's 300-year-old phrase still keeps its haunting simplicity. For generations, America meant the part of the earth that was not corrupt, not worn by labor, tainted by inequality or poisoned by greed. This myth of paradise-on-the-frontier pervaded 18th century ideas about America and, by the mid-19th, had become one of the chief regulating ideas of America's discourse about itself: "That unfallen, western world," as Melville wrote in Moby Dick, "which to the eyes...
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