James Fenimore Cooper’s novels as a regional text

Abstract

The better part of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels where the author pictures different episodes of Otsego county’s (NY) life in the days of “frontier” can be estimated as a kind of “topological supertext”. He evokes images of American province at its birth with all its basic characteristics. Literary descriptions thus produce knowledge of a real object. He strives to define certain constants: geography, landscapes, human behavior, that can be interpreted as tokens of territorial identity. The issue of land ownership is one of the permanent items in all the novels. Cooper presents it as a matter of importance for the inhabitants of his native county, but the opposition of the legal owners that quite often are far from the estate and those who settle down and cultivate it in reality is one of the typical features of American movement to the Pacific up to the end of the 19^th century. J.F. Cooper also reveals semantics of the image and the idea of house that is crucially important in all the cultures, and especially for the newcomers. So, Land and House in Cooper’s “topological supertext” can be defined as archetypal loci vital for the chronicle of the American frontier history. All this was of great importance for the national self-identification.