Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: quests, romances, knights, etc.

michael david sharp (msharp@umich.edu)
Sat, 13 Jun 1998 10:20:35 -0400 (EDT) Kevin -- your not being a professor is clearly not impt. You are right
about Natty Bumpo -- a number of studies of genre fiction heroes have
cited Bumpo as an important literary ancestor.

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Michael D. Sharp Email: msharp@umich.edu
Department of English Lang. and Lit. Phone: (313) 761-8776
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Fax: (313) 763-3128

On Sat, 13 Jun 1998, Kevin Smith wrote:

> Regarding Huck Finn. Another (and perhaps closer) example of a classic
> American novel which contributed to the hardboiled (or is it hard-boiled?)
> detective mythology is James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.
> Ponderous brain-clogging prose, now, but in The Last of the Mohicans, The
> Deerslayer, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairies, Natty "Hawkeye"
> Bumpo, a "man without a cross", daring to "speak the truth consarnin' you
> or any man that lived," does all sorts of P.I. things, like being an
> outsider working mostly alone in a corrupt and violent world, trying to
> hold on to a personal code of honour, carrying a gun, and working on a
> wandering daughter job or two (or quest, if you like).
>
> I'm not a professor or anything, just a guy that reads, but it strikes me
> that Hawkeye is the link between Arthur's knights and the private eye.
>
> (and here's a little trivia: in a French graphic novel quite a few years
> back, the lead hero, a Hollywood private detective was named
> Hippolytus...Finn... H. Finn? Given that the myth of America is a popular
> one in France, it's probably not a coincidence.)
>
> And I'm wrapping up the Streeter novel. Sorry, guys, for helping to inflict
> it on you. The first one, The Low End of Nowhere, was much better, really.
> The Long Reach is a bit of a downer.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Kevin Smith
> The Thrilling Detective Web Site
> http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
>
> No Business For a Lady? Women detectives in this month's P.I. Poll!
>
>
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