Search results for "James Fenimore Cooper"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
“From Savage to Sublime (And Partway Back): Indians and Antiquity in Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature”
2016
This article examines the comparisons made between Indians and Antiquity in early nineteenth-century American literature (notably in the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper); to do so, it begins by reaching back to references in European and American writings of the eighteenth century. One of the main motivations behind the associations between Native Americans and the Ancient World made in the early decades of the nineteenth century was to “elevate” Indians in order to transform them into worthy symbols of the recently established United States. Such associations also rendered them suitable subjects for treatment by authors inspired to a large extent by the Romantic Moveme…
“Keeping Humans Out of the Picture: The (Almost) Pristine Wilderness of The Last of the Mohicans”
2021
International audience
“Allochronic Views of Native Americans; or, Vanished Vanishing Indians in The Last of the Mohicans”
2016
James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757, first published in 1826, offers an archetypal example, perhaps the archetypal example, of a literary expression of the trope of the Vanishing Indian. This theme is present in many works of nineteenth-century American literature that include Native Americans as their subjects, but Cooper’s romance, whose very title evokes the disappearance of an entire tribe, takes the sad fate of North America’s indigenous peoples as one o...