Fenimore Cooper's Literary Violations is an 1895 essay by Mark Twain, written as a satire and critique of the works of James Fenimore Cooper.
This essay is characteristic of Twain's sour, mocking, and highly satirical literary criticism style, a form he has also used to evaluate writers such as Oliver Goldsmith, George Eliot , Jane Austen and Robert Louis Stevenson.
By : Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
Summary
Twain begins by quoting a few critics who praise the works of Cooper: Brander Matthews, Thomas Lounsbury and Wilkie Collins. He then claims that they have never read the novels themselves, and that Cooper's work is seriously flawed:
- 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.
He goes on to list 18 separate literary rules he feels that Cooper does not follow, such as "The tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air," and "The author shall use the right word, not its second cousin." Twain continues on with few positive things to say about Cooper's writing, citing several examples from Cooper's writing to illustrate the unbelievable excess of the style.
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