The Last of the Mohicans as a Mixture of Genres

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Recommended: Influence of romanticism

James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans as a Mixture of Genres

James Fenimore Cooper's The last of the Mohicans is often seen as a simple adventure story within the historical frame of the French and Indian war. Only if we analyze the novel in a closer way, we will realize that it goes beyond this label and that its sources are many and varied, giving the work the richness of the genres on which Cooper's novel is based. These are romanticism, western, (being its author one of the forerunners of these genres in the U.S.A.), captivity narratives and epic.

In works belonging to Romanticism, nature is given a great important role. In fact, the action takes place in the open air, except for the chapters of the siege of Fort William Henry, so it is the setting which predominates along the work. The close connection between the characters of romantic novels and nature is exemplified in the characters of Chingachgook, Uncas and Hawkeye, which apart from knowing the place where they live and being completely adapted to it, they consider nature as a divine entity. In his introduction of this novel in the Oxford Classics edition, John Mcwilliams agrees with this affirmation of the concluding that for Cooper it was more than the place where they move; 'it was the very condition of life, the shaper of moral values and of human behavior, for good and for ill'. In a similar way, the same happens in other important romantic American novels such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In the former, Hester and his daughter Pearl live in close connection with nature as a source of moral freedom, and in the latter, the Nantucketeers consider themselves as part of the sea.

The theme of nationalism, a...

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In conclusion, The Last of the Mohicans does not belong totally to a particular genre since it displays some key aspects of epic, it is one of the most important forerunners of western and inherits some aspects of characters of captivity narratives, facts which help to create an special example of romantic literature close to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, works which seem to be adventure stories but in fact they are richer than that due to both their quality and the variety of their sources.

WORKS CITED

Cohen, Hennig and Levernier, James eds. and comps. The Indians and their Captives. Wesport, Connetcticut: Greenwood Press Inc, 1977. 299 pp.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The last of the Mohicans. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford's World Classics., 1998. 433 pp.

López Estrada, Francisco. Poema del Cid. 12th ed. Fuenlabrada, Madrid: Odres Nuevos, 1986. 164 pp.

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