American Literature / Unit 6 AML 0511 short lesson, about 20 seconds
James Fenimore Cooper and the Frontier Romance
Captions available
The idea
Cooper, a judge's son who grew up at Otsego Lake and saw frontiersmen and Native people as a boy, took the historical romances of Walter Scott as his model and made the vanishing wilderness his subject. The witness calls him a pathfinder for Melville and Twain.
In practice
Scott's method, applied to the American forest.
Where people slip
He wrote romances, not records.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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