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06.James Fenimore Cooper
a.James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He was the first border writer and America’ first successful novelist, and was called “ the father of American Novels.”
i.He developed three kinds of novels: revolutionary historical stories, sea adventure novels, and American frontier novels. "Leatherstocking Tales" is a collection of five tales he wrote. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel “The Last of the Mohicans,”which many consider his masterpiece. And “The Pioneers” was probably the first actual romance of the frontier in American literature, So Cooper was generally regarded as the first writer who hinted at national subjects.
b.Cooper was also one of the first authors to write about the American westward movement, Cooper’s claim to greatness in American literature lay in the fact that he created a myth about the formative period of the American nation.
i.His creation of the character of Natty Bumppo is the image of an independent, self-reliant, solitary man, the perfect example of individualism in an untouched, unimaginably huge virgin forest.
ii.Suppose the history of the United States is, in a sense, the process of the American settlers exploring and pushing the American frontier forever westward. In that case, Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales effectively approximates the American national experience of adventure into the West. He turned the West and border into a usable past and helped introduce the western tradition to American literature.
c.Cooper wrote with increasing awareness of the importance of fiction of the Western frontier, where American society may be conceived as passing from one set of principles to another in two directions. Cooper's power lay in his assurance that one path was morally right and the other practical inevitable. Here lies Cooper's conflict of allegiance. He was devoted to the principles of social order and responsible for the idea of nature.
d.Although many of Cooper's best-known works are set in New York State, their characters are "Americans," not simply New York's. He describes American characters as the pioneer, the Indian. and the Yankee sailor. The problems they faced were not merely American but universal.
i.He juxtaposed the work of man and the reign of natives on the scene of the American frontier. He depicts the whole process of the American quest for an ideal society.
e.style
i.plot structures:James Fenimore Cooper is good at inventing plots. His plots are sometimes quite incredible, but his stories are immensely intriguing.
ii.landscape description:His landscape descriptions are majestic and suggestive of Sir Walter Scott, the legendary spirit whose border tales might have inspired him.
iii.rich imagination :He was pretty conscious of the association of different locals. The fact that he had never been to the frontier and among the Indians and yet could write five huge epic books about them is eloquent proof of the richness of his imagination. His Indians are among the first appearing in American fiction and probably the first group of noble savages.
iv.clumsy style :He is most successful in scenes of violence and actions or of night-time terror and mystery. But his character descriptions are often unsatisfactory, His plot is sometimes improbable and absurd. There are occasionally problems with his descriptions of the action scenes. His style is dreadful. His characterization seems wooden and lacks probability, and his language and use of dialect are not authentic.
