edenic

comparative more edenic · superlative most edenic

1. alternativeAlternative form of Edenic.

   It is key that her one and only intimate relationship, with Janet, is recalled in memories of play that enact an edenic maternal world and a vaginal space: Janet. Irma. Playing house together in the apple-trees back of the barn.

   2001, Martha Celeste Carpentier, The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell, →ISBN, page 69

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   Like Jack London (or Theodore Roosevelt, for that matter, or Owen Wister, Frank Norris, and an entire generation of young men of the late nineteenth century, enamored simultaneously of the frontier and the establishment), Burroughs wanted money, power, and status as well as release into an imagined edenic frontier.

   1990, Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s, →ISBN

   If I lived them at a most unoriginal level of elation—and I very much doubt that my edenic content was very different from that of most other brides ... If I lived them in an unremarkable delight, I also lived them consumed in unremarkable occupations.

   2009, Phyllis Tickle, The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape, →ISBN

comparative more Edenic · superlative most Edenic · alternative edenic

1. Of or suggesting Eden, the paradise of the Bible.

   Our understanding of the Edenic motif in American fiction stems largely from its articulation by three primary critics — R.W.B. Lewis, Leslie Fiedler, and D. H. Lawrence.

   1999, Robert W. Hamblin; Charles A. Peek, editors, A William Faulkner Encyclopedia, →ISBN, page 111

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   Thus, when Paul and Billy turn to the Edenic archetype, one must not view this as an acceptance of the "truth" of the Judeo-Christian tradition from which this myth is borrowed.

   1994, Will Wright, Steven Kaplan, The Image of Technology in Literature, the Media, and Society

   To the extent that an abstract Edenic landscape crowds out the teenage rubber tapper in a faded World Cup T-shirt, the stinging smoke of factories in a treeless city ringed by forest, or the lone plant sprouting in the cracks of a sunbaked roof, it impoverishes our vision of Amazonia, as well as of a larger natural world that demands not just to be respected but, first of all, to be rethought.

   1995, Candace Slater, “Amazonia as Edenic Narrative”, in William Cronon, editor, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, W. W. Norton & Company, →ISBN, page 115

   But we need not try to re-create these circumstances, any more than the Sabbath celebration of an Edenic world means that celebrants must go naked and picnic in a garden; we need only make it a happy and special meal.

   2014, Gracia Fay Ellwood, Taking the Adventure: Faith and Our Kinship with Animals, →ISBN, page 194

   The world Burden inhabits with her husband, James (she has changed his name here, but apparently not much else), is one of Edenic privilege. They live in multimillion-dollar homes in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard, belong to private clubs, have keys to private beaches, kids in private schools.

   2026 January 11, Alex Kuczynski, “Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

plural Edenics · alternative edenic

1. One who promotes an Edenic ideal.

   Let all that have an ear hear and all that have an eye see, the Edenic will not be denied!

   2014, Rich'iz Burnstine, The Edenic, →ISBN, page 195

   2 more examples

   Then there are the Edenics, who exclude all cooked food; the Wallacites, who abhor salt and refuse bread containing yeast; the Haigites, who do not include peas or beans in their vegetarianism; and the Allinsonians, who abandoned tea in favor of a solution of dried cereals.

   1905, Search-light Thrown on the Activities of the World; Volumes 25-26, page 314

   The Edenics wrote historical novels that place the belle in an antebellum setting, perpetuate the notion that she is an ideal woman, and, most important, present her as a symbol for the lost Garden of the antebellum South.

   1985, Kathryn Lee Seidel, The southern Belle in the American novel, page 127