美国文学

2. James Fenimore Cooper 詹姆斯·费尼莫尔·库珀(1789-1851) novelist

1. his Works. The Spy1821 《间谍》The Pilot1823 《水手》Leatherstocking Tales 《皮袜子故事集》

Leatherstocking Tales

The Pioneers 1823 《拓荒者》 (4)

The Last of the Mohicans 1826 《最后的莫希干人》 (2)

The Prairie 1827 《大草原》 (5)

The Pathfinder 1840 《探路人》 (3)

The Deerslayer 1841 《杀鹿者》 (1)

2. Life.

a. Born into a rich land-holding family of New Jersey, Cooper was one of the new American authors who did not have to worry about money.

b.He was sent to Yale at 14, but was expelled in his junior year because of improper behavior

c.He went and spent five years at sea; then, while still in his early twenties, he inherited his father’s vast fortune and settled down to a life of comfort and even luxury.

d.His second book, The Spy, a novel about the American Revolution, proved to be an immense success.

3. His Skills

He is good at making plots. All his novels are full of myths.

He had never been to the frontier and among the Indians and yet could write five huge epic books about them is an eloquent proof of the richness of his imagination.

He created the first Indians to appear in American fiction and probably the first group of noble savages.

He hit upon the native subject of frontier and wilderness, and helped to introduce the “Western” tradition into American literature.

4. Analysis of The Pioneers

The conflict of the story is between Leatherstocking and Judge Temple.

To Leatherstocking (Nutty Bumppo), the wilderness is good, pure, perfect.

Judge Temple holds the idea that man remains savage without law and order

Natty Bumppo represents the ideal American, living a virtuo us and free life in God’s world. To him and to Cooper, the wildness is good, pure, perfect, where there is freedom not tainted and fettered by any forms of human institutions.

Natty Bumppo is a veritable embodiment of human virtues like innocence, simplicity, honesty and generosity, a man born with an immaculate [i’mækjulit] sense of good and evil and right and wrong. （纳蒂·班波）

Judge Temple, the portrayal of whose character is a good indication of Cooper's ambivalence as a writer of frontier life. Judge Temple is a man of honor and integrity.

He is as much a frontiersman as Natty Bumppo. He represents "the practically inevitable" aspect of frontier life.He symbolizes law and civilization.

5. Cooper's contribution to American Literature

1) Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels about the frontier of American settlers.

(2) The Pioneers was probably the first true romance of the frontier in American literature.

3).Cooper's claim to greatness in American literature lies in the fact that he created a myth about the formative period of the American nation.