Beyond Innocence: THE COMING OF AGE OF MYTH AND SYMBOL CRITICISM

In 1923 English writer and literary critic D. H. Lawrence suggested that the United States’ rebirth as a new youth was the “true myth of America” (60). At the time of its publication, Studies in Classic American Literature failed to reverberate with the academic community, in part because American literature was not yet viewed with the same respect as European or world classics; instead, as Lawrence observed, books by American writers were equated to kiddie fare, best read by children (Studies 13). While Vernon Louis Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1927), one of the first substantial critical studies of