Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences

About the book

Twain opens his attack on James Fenimore Cooper by proposing rules that fiction ought to observe, then presents passages and situations he believes violate them. His case moves through diction, characterization, dialogue, tracking, physical arrangements, and the management of improbable events. The pleasure is rhetorical as much as critical: each alleged fault becomes an occasion for an increasingly elaborate demonstration of disbelief. Readers need not accept the fairness of every charge to follow the standards Twain makes visible through his objections. The essay is a polemical performance rather than a balanced survey of Cooper's achievement. It invites attention to the way criticism can turn close reading into comedy, while also raising the question of what happens when a critic's most entertaining example becomes more memorable than the work being judged.

• Literary craft
• Plausibility
• Critical rhetoric

Why read it

For a sharp comic performance that makes questions of fictional technique concrete through an aggressively argued case.

Critical essay · English text