The Deerslayer
Historical novel | |
Published | 1841 (Lea & Blanchard: Philadelphia) |
---|---|
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
Pages | 560 pp in two volumes |
Followed by | The Last of the Mohicans |
The Deerslayer, or The First War-Path (1841) was James Fenimore Cooper's last novel in his Leatherstocking Tales. Its 1740–1745 time period makes it the first installment chronologically and in the lifetime of the hero of the Leatherstocking tales, Natty Bumppo. The novel's setting on Otsego Lake in central, upstate New York, is the same as that of The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking Tales to be published (1823). The Deerslayer is considered to be the prequel to the rest of the series. Fenimore Cooper begins his work by relating the astonishing advance of civilization in New York State, which is the setting of four of his five Leatherstocking Tales.
Plot
This novel introduces Natty Bumppo as "Deerslayer," a young
Shortly before the rendezvous, Hutter's residence is besieged by the indigenous Hurons, and Hutter and March sneak into the camp of the besiegers to kill and scalp as many as they can, but they are captured in the act, and later
Criticism
The brunt of Mark Twain's satire and criticism of Cooper's writing, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (1895), fell on The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder. Twain wrote at the beginning of the essay: "In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."[1] He then lists 18 out of 19 rules "governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction" that Cooper violates in The Deerslayer.
Proponents of Cooper have criticized Twain's essay as unfair and distorted.
Hilarious though Twain's essay is, it is valid only within its own narrow and sometimes misapplied criteria. Whether Twain is attacking Cooper's diction or Hawkeye's tracking feats, his strategy is to charge Cooper with one small inaccuracy, reconstruct the surrounding narrative or sentence around it, and then produce the whole as evidence that Cooper's kind of English would prevent anyone from seeing reality.[4]
In Carl Van Doren's view, the book is essentially a romance, at the same time considerably realistic. The dialect is careful, the wordcraft generally sound. The movement is rapid, the incidents varied, and the piece as a whole absorbing. The reality of the piece comes chiefly from the reasoned presentation of the central issue: the conflict in Leather-Stocking between the forces which draw him to the woods and those which seek to attach him to his human kind. Van Doren calls Judith Hutter one of the few convincing young women in Cooper's works; of the minor characters only the ardent young Chingachgook and the silly Hetty Hutter call for his notice.[5]
D. H. Lawrence called The Deerslayer "one of the most beautiful and perfect books in the world: flawless as a jewel and of gem-like concentration."[6]
Adaptations
Comics
In January 1944
French comics artist Jean Ache adapted the story into a newspaper comic for Jeudi-Matin in 1949.[7]
Film
1913: The Deerslayer, starring Harry T. Morey and Wallace Reid. Filmed at Otsego Lake, the actual setting of the novel. Filmed in 1911, released two years later.
1920:
1943: Deerslayer, starring Bruce Kellogg and Jean Parker.
1957: The Deerslayer, starring Lex Barker and Rita Moreno.
1967:
1990: Зверобой, a Soviet version.
1994:
Radio
In 1932, the Leatherstocking Tales were adapted as a thirteen-part serial radio drama. It is directed and performed by Charles Fredrick Lindsay and contains both Deerslayer and Last of the Mohicans.
TV
A made-for-television film was released in 1978. The film was directed by Richard Friedenberg and starred Steve Forrest as Hawkeye.
References
- ^ Twain, Mark. "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses". Mark Twain in His Times. University of Virginia. Retrieved December 6, 2013.
- ^ Schachterle, Lance & Ljungquist, Kent (1988). Myerson, Joel (ed.). "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Defenses: Twain and the Text of The Deerslayer". Studies in the American Renaissance. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. pp. 401–417.
- ^ Schachterle & Ljungquist, p. 410
- ^ "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses (Introduction)". Twain's Indians. University of Virginia. Retrieved 31 December 2012.
- ^ Doren, Carl Van (1920). . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.
- ISBN 9780521254212.
- ^ "Jean Ache".
Further reading
- Rowland Hughes: "The Deerslayer, or The First War Path". In: Christopher John Murry: Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850. Routledge, 2013, ISBN 9781135455798, pp. 271-273
- DARNELL, D. (1979). “THE DEERSLAYER”: COOPER’S TRAGEDY OF MANNERS. Studies in the Novel, 11(4), 406–415. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29532000
- Vasile, P. (1975). Cooper’s “The Deerslayer”: The Apotheosis of Man and Nature. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 43(3), 485–507. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1461847
- Lawrence H Klibbe: CliffsNotes on Cooper's The Deerslayer. HMH Books, 1970, ISBN 9780544181182
External links
- The Deerslayer at Project Gutenberg
- The Deerslayer public domain audiobook at LibriVox