Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences

Mark Twain · Tiếng Anh

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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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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Mark Twain