James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was the son of a prosperous Quaker landowner, Judge William Cooper, who founded Cooperstown on Lake Otsega in New York state. He studied at Yale but he was expelled because of a prank. In the years 1806-1811 Cooper served in the US Navy. After he married into the distinguished family of the De Lanceys, he lived comfortably as a country gentleman.
Cooper wrote his first novel, Precautions (1820) at the age of thirty. It was an imitation of Jane Austen’s novels. His second novel, The Spy (1821), a novel about the American War of Independence, was based on Walter Scott’s Waverley. It brought him fame and wealth. The Pioneers (1823) is the first in his “Leatherstocking” series which also contain The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). These novels explore the American wilderness. They tell the story of a frontiersman, Natty Bumppo, also called Leatherstocking, and his Indian companion, Chingachgook. Natty Bumppo embodies the American frontiersman as a natural gentleman. He was the forerunner of the good cowboy of all the American westerns. The “Leatherstocking Tales” depict the early frontier period of American history.
PYTANIE 5
Cooper was a Romantic writer who dealt with historical or legendary characters of the recent past. Cooper had the pictorial imagination to describe the beauty of American nature. In the “Leatherstocking Tales” he explored the struggle between wilderness as symbolised by the Indians and civilisation. He suggested that understanding and coexistence between the white colonists and the Indians was possible. Natty Bumppo, who represented unfettered individualism and natural aristocracy, became the friend of the Indian chief Chingachgook. Cooper’s fiction reflects the emergence of Romanticism in America.
TRANSCENDENTALISTS - American transcendentalism was a philosophical, religious and a literary movement. Like Romanticism, it was also a reaction against the Englightenment. Transcendentalism began as a reform movement in the Unitarian church. . Transcendental philosophy was based on:
monism,
a belief in the unity of the world and God.
Transcendentalists believed that:
the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world,
human nature is essentially good, but organised society makes it corrupt
they rejected the rationalist idea of God as the “divine watchmaker”.
Writers:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, he described the doctrine of transcendentalism in his essays, especially Nature and Self-Reliance. Emerson distinguished two primary categories in the universe: nature and soul. Man’s intuition is a direct link with the universal spirit.
Henry Thoreau, He tried to prove that, if necessary, an individual could survive without the help of civilisation. For two years he lived alone in a cabin at Walden Pond which he built for himself. The fruit of his reflections was an extraordinary book entitled Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) in which he described his experiment in self-sufficient life. It was also an attack on social conformity and a celebration of individualism.