Return To The Original

Modern industrial civilization provides a high degree of material comfort formankind, and also brings alienation and estrangement on people and their spirit worlds.Thus, mankinds begin to re-examine modern civilization. Primitivism is a term that cameinto being in this background. By calling human’s innocence, primitivism is proposed tofind another habitat for humanity to return to the original state of life and simple lifestyle.The paper focuses on the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper’sLeatherstocking Tales and the comprehension of these texts leads to the discovery that,while describing the natural scenes of the primitive areas in North America, and theancient life styles of Indians, Cooper is actually building a spiritual home in which modernpeople inhabit. Therefore, taking the primitivism as a dividing point and adopting suchmethods as closing reading and literary anthropology criticism, the paper is meant to findout the primitive themes in Cooper’s novels, and analyze the original causes in primitivecreation.The paper consists of five parts. The introduction describes the origin anddevelopment of primitivism, researches on Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales at homeand abroad, and put forward my tentative idea. The main text consists of three parts. Thefirst chapter specifically analyzes the primitive themes in Leatherstocking Tales. Itdiscusses respectively from the natural environment, the characters and the primitiveculture of Indians. The second chapter shows the conflicts in the tales. The last chapterdiscusses the original causes of primitivism in Cooper’s creation, which analyzes fromtwo aspects; they are the frontier wilderness in U.S. and the Westward Movement. Theconclusion part carries on the summary, and shows my own ideas on the development ofliterature in the future.