The Pioneers - Couverture souple

Cooper, James Fenimore

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0873954238 ISBN 13 : 9780873954235

Editeur : State University of New York Press, 1980

Synopsis

Written in 1821-22 at a crucial point in Cooper's life and based on some of his most cherished youthful memories, The Pioneers today evokes the American pioneering experience with astonishing vibrance of authentic detail and a largeness of philosophic grasp seldom if ever equaled in our fiction.

The circumstances behind the composition and publication of the book are here explained for the first time; and the text, originally set without competent supervision in the midst of the yellow fever epidemic in New York in 1822, is presented with the cumulative improvements of Cooper's "strenuous pen" in five subsequent revisions, without the customary accumulation of compositorial errors.

Quite possibly America's first bestseller (3,500 copies were sold within hours of publication), The Pioneers became the first of the world-famous Leatherstocking Tales. Its verbal pictures "excited a sensation among the artists, altogether unprecedented in the history of our domestic literature" and helped establish the style of the Hudson River School, our first group of landscape painters. Translated early into all the major languages of Europe, The Pioneers was one of the first American novels to carry distinctive, authoritative American experience to the world.

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was born in New Jersey but grew up in Cooperstown, NY, founded by his father when Cooper was one year old. He enrolled at Yale at the age of thirteen, but was expelled in his third year for misbehavior. He then sailed before the mast as a merchant seaman and as a midshipman in the U.S. Navy, experiences that led to his successful sea novels, such as The Pilot (1823). The Leatherstocking Tales were published from 1823 to 1841. Arranged according to the chronology of their hero, Natty Bumppo, who appears under various names in all five romances, the sequence is The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie. His works have been translated into numerous languages and have been enthusiastically received because of their vigor and robust narration. Cooper died in 1851 at his home in Cooperstown.
 
Max Cavitch is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman and of a variety of articles on American literature and art. He is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves on the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and he is co-editor of the book series Early American Studies.

Edward Watts is professor of English at Michigan State University. He is the author, most recently, of In This Remote Country: Colonial French Culture in the Anglo-American Imagination, 1780-1860 and co-editor of Mapping Region in Early American Writing.

Présentation de l'éditeur

The Pioneers: The Sources of the Susquehanna; a Descriptive Tale is a historical novel, the first published of the Leatherstocking Tales, a series of five novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper. While The Pioneers was published in 1823, before any of the other Leatherstocking Tales, the period of time it covers makes it the fourth chronologically. The story takes place on the rapidly advancing frontier of New York State and features a middle-aged Leatherstocking (Natty Bumppo), Judge Marmaduke Temple of Templeton, whose life parallels that of the author's father Judge William Cooper, and Elizabeth Temple (the author's sister Susan Cooper), of Cooperstown. The story begins with an argument between the Judge and the Leatherstocking over who killed a buck, and as Cooper reviews many of the changes to New York's Lake Otsego, questions of environmental stewardship, conservation, and use prevail. The plot develops as the Leatherstocking and Chingachgook begin to compete with the Temples for the loyalties of a mysterious young visitor, "Oliver Edwards," the "young hunter," who eventually marries Elizabeth. Chingachgook dies, exemplifying the vexed figure of the "dying Indian," and Natty vanishes into the sunset. For all its strange twists and turns, 'The Pioneers' may be considered one of the first ecological novels in the United States.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: State University of New York Press
• Date d'édition: 1980
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0873954238
• ISBN 13: 9780873954235
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 460
• Éditeur: Beard James Franklin
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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