Cooperův Wyandot: nová varianta mizejícího indiána
James Fenimore Cooper’s Wyandotté: A new variant of the vanishing Indian

Summary/Abstract: The paper challenges the conventional critical assumption that James Fenimore Cooperwas recycling the myth of the Noble and Ignoble Savage and the stereotype of the Goodand Bad Indian. The paper takes as a starting point the discourse of savagism (Roy HarveyPearce), in which the opposites are blended into a single mixed type, neither purelynoble or ignoble, good or bad, the so called Vanishing Indian. The paper demonstratesthat Cooper created a greater variety of types of the Vanishing Indian and that theirtypology was the result of a largely autonomous (semiotic) process of variation, based onnew combinations of already existing traits. Moreover, in his late novels, most clearly inWyandotté (1843) Cooper even probed the options of moving beyond the semantic fieldof the Vanishing Indian towards a more mimetic concept of culturally assimilated Indian.

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