Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
Mark Twain · English
Mark Twain's 1895 essay «Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences» is one of the most famous—and most gleefully cruel—pieces of literary criticism in American letters.
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Pagera Editor's Note
Mark Twain's 1895 essay «Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences» is one of the most famous—and most gleefully cruel—pieces of literary criticism in American letters. Twain dismantles the reputation of James Fenimore Cooper, author of the «Leatherstocking Tales» and long celebrated as the father of American romantic fiction. He opens by ridiculing three eminent critics who praised Cooper without, apparently, having read him; then he lays down nineteen rules of romantic fiction and shows that Cooper broke eighteen of them. What keeps the essay alive after more than a century is not just its cruelty but its precision: every charge is pinned to a specific scene—six Indians failing to drop onto a passing boat, a stream that changes width for no reason, dialogue that swings from Yale lecture to plantation dialect within a paragraph, a roll-call of thirty words Cooper used «almost right» but not quite. For modern readers the essay is two things at once: high entertainment that produces audible laughter, and a small masterclass in what it means to write with precision.
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
Mark Twain · English
Mark Twain's 1895 essay «Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences» is one of the most famous—and most gleefully cruel—pieces of literary criticism in American letters.
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Original (English)
FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENCES by Mark Twain The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper's novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively s
Indonesian translation (Pagera AI)
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Pagera Editor's Note
Mark Twain's 1895 essay «Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences» is one of the most famous—and most gleefully cruel—pieces of literary criticism in American letters. Twain dismantles the reputation of James Fenimore Cooper, author of the «Leatherstocking Tales» and long celebrated as the father of American romantic fiction. He opens by ridiculing three eminent critics who praised Cooper without, apparently, having read him; then he lays down nineteen rules of romantic fiction and shows that Cooper broke eighteen of them. What keeps the essay alive after more than a century is not just its cruelty but its precision: every charge is pinned to a specific scene—six Indians failing to drop onto a passing boat, a stream that changes width for no reason, dialogue that swings from Yale lecture to plantation dialect within a paragraph, a roll-call of thirty words Cooper used «almost right» but not quite. For modern readers the essay is two things at once: high entertainment that produces audible laughter, and a small masterclass in what it means to write with precision.
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