Keeping Humans Out of the Picture: The (Almost) Pristine Wilderness of The Last of the Mohicans
This article examines the depiction of the wilderness in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. It begins by recalling that in the early decades of the nineteenth century, descriptions of pristine landscapes were relatively common in American writings, whose authors were often striving to...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ranam, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines
2024
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | This article examines the depiction of the wilderness in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. It begins by recalling that in the early decades of the nineteenth century, descriptions of pristine landscapes were relatively common in American writings, whose authors were often striving to create a distinctively national literature for the new country. Cooper drew on the traditions of the picturesque and the sublime and made use of “painterly” techniques to create a “constructed” wilderness setting for his romance. By 1826, however, when the book was published, the American environment was already in the process of significant transformation, not to say devastation, brought about by human activity. And some people, including Cooper, were already decrying this destruction. In The Last of the Mohicans, however, the author does not address environmental questions directly, as he had, for example, in his previous work, The Pioneers, but rather offers an image of untouched nature—of the way things used to be. Cooper does nevertheless incorporate reminders—which are all marginalized in one way or another to keep them out of the literary picture he creates—of the fact that the American landscape was already in the process of undergoing disfiguring change. |
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