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JAMES FENIMORE COOPER’S ENVIRONMENTAL PIONEERS (1823) IN THE LIGHT OF LITERARY ECOCRITICISM
ABSTRACT (en)
The aim of the paper is to discover to what extent and in which respects James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers (1823) can be regarded as the forerunner of American environmental literature, preceding thus Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), which is usually considered as the foundational text. As a classification frame, the paper employs Lawrence Buell’s set of interrelated imaginative structures of ecocentric literary vision. The results of the examination indicate that out of the five imaginative structures of environmental literature, Relinquishment, Nature’s Personhood, Nature’s Face and Mind’s Eye: Seasons, Sense of Place, and Environmental Apocalypticism, all are at work and display a distinctive ecocentric orientation in the novel but with a different degree of intensity and frequency.
KEYWORDS (en)
Ecocriticism — ecocentrism — environmental fiction — Lawrence Buell — James Fenimore Cooper — The Pioneers
KLÍČOVÁ SLOVA (cs)
Ekokritika — ekocentrismus — environmentální literatura — Lawrence Buell — James Fenimore Cooper — Průkopníci
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/23366729.2022.2.1
PRIMARY SOURCES
Cooper, James Fenimore. Průkopníci. Přel. Vladimír Henzl. Praha: SNDK, 1964.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale, The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. 1. Eds. Lance Schachterle — Kenneth M. Andersen. New York: Library of America, 1985, s. 1–466.
Cooper, James Fenimore. Poslední Mohykán. Přel. Vladimír Henzl. Praha: Albatros, 1991.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden aneb Život v lesích. Přel. Josef Schwarz. Praha — Litomyšl: Paseka, 2006.
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