Cesta amerického románu k romantickým asociacím a mýtu
The Journey of the Early American Novel to the Romantic Associations and Myth

Summary/Abstract: The paper is concerned with the search of American national literature for its new content and form. In spite of many obstacles that the American writers faced, one path of American literature daringly tried the genre of historical romance, made popular by Walter Scott. The raw material of American space, both urban and natural, was supposed to be transformed, and familiar places reimagined and defamiliarized into places with storied and poetic associations. The paper confronts the principles of the program for American literature laid out in reviews by an important American critic of the first half of the 19th century, W. H. Gardiner, with the literary practice of James Fenimore Cooper‘s novels The Spy, The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Deerslayer. The paper analyzes the connection between Gardiner’s call for imaginative reconstruction of the history of a place and Cooper’s application of this approach. It is concluded that this imaginative reconstruction of the geographical place into a topos is linked with the archetypal gesture of physical violence, which becomes an important structure in the process of constituting the American self.

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