Sedgwick's novel "Hope Leslie" The purpose of this resear

The purpose of this research is to examine Hope Leslie by Catherine Maria Sedgwick as a historical novel in the tradition of the genre as established by Sir Walter Scott in Europe and by J.F. Cooper in America. The plan of the research will be to set forth the theoretical foundation of the connection between Sedgwick and Cooper and their connection to Scott's development of historical fiction, and then to show in what ways Hope Leslie can be seen as within or apart from Scott's model.

Because Sedgwick and Cooper were exact contemporaries and because Sedgwick indirectly acknowledges the value of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (81) in treating of American Indians Hope Leslie does not mark the absolute beginning of American historical fiction. However, Hope Leslie is perfectly in line with Cooper's work to the extent that it portrays and corresponds to the early development of North America from a broad historical perspective (Lukacs 64). In the pattern of ideas emerging in the work, and in the means Sedgwick uses to bring out those ideas, Hope Leslie is also consistent with (though not identical to) the historical novel as developed by Scott, as a product of the French Revolution and consequent "transformation of men's existence and consciousness throughout Europe" (Lukacs 31). For if the philosophical and cultural residue of the French Revolution informed Scott's narrative method, the causes and consequences of the American Revolution, which preceded and influenced the

ant. But Hope Leslie seems more overtly a document intended to examine the moral and social content of customs, practice, and manners as primary givens of existence than a story that, like Satanstoe, presumes a certain content of social praxis and describes action that takes place within it. Kelley cites Sedgwick's declaration that she "did not intend to present a literal history of the Puritans; instead, she sought through historical imagination to investigate 'the character of the times.' Hope Leslie remains . . . an investigation into the roots of American moral character, particularly into what it meant in America to be a moral woman" (Kelley xiii). Sedgwick's claim can be related to Lukacs's discussion of "what matters in the historical novel, [which] is not the re-telling of great historical events but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events" (Lukacs 42). In Satanstoe, such an awakening is shaped by events that allow those of Corny's class in particular to arrive at some degree of comfort and security in their future in New York. To the degree the emphasis of Hope Leslie is on the nexus of character as personality and temper of the times, Sedgwick's stated enterprise appears consistent with Lukacs's d

Category: Literature - S