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영어

The West in 19th century American literature has been embodied as a contradictory space-time. It is a material background that paves the way for Manifest Destiny disguised in the name of Progress. On the other hand, it is a spiritual place in which a brotherly love of two different racial males takes shape and develops into a sort of human solidarity that calls the progress into question; Americanism, a begetter of Manifest Destiny, also gives birth to a redeeming vision in its very womb; a brotherly love between the men free from the curse of racism. James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, the first work of the Leatherstocking Tales is one of the amazing literary realizations of that paradox. It is highly intriguing the way The Pioneers solves the dilemma embedded in the antithetical forces represented by Judge Temple as a representation of Progress and Natty Bumppo as an exemplar of Conservation. A marriage plot and Deux ex Machina are meticulously mobilized as a trouble shooter that streamlines its complex narrative to a happy ending. But the deathbed testimonies of the last survivor of the Delaware, Chingachgook, and Natty's disenchantment with the way Templeton society runs belie Cooper's rosy success in bringing the narrative order out of the chaotic plot; withal the overriding of Judge Temples' reason, Chingachgook's heading for “the happy hunting-ground,” and Natty's leaving for the West interrogate the shaping ideology of American white civilization.