Leatherstockings and River Pirates: The Adventure Novels of Friedrich Gerstäcker
2014; Arkansas Historical Association; Volume: 73; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-1213
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoJoHn MarcHer, tHe Main cHaracter in Henry James' 1903 short story Beast in the Jungle is fiercely convinced that the useless and boring life that he is leading, typical of a member of the upper class, is really a ruse, and that there is something else-though he does not quite know what-in store for him.1 One day, whatever it is will pounce on him, like a beast in the jungle. However, James constructed Marcher as a grotesquely dispassionate character to whom nothing ever happens. He loses the love of his life because he doesn't even realize that is what she is. Marcher is a man who can travel for almost a year and all through Asia and come home with nothing to tell, because nothing touched him.The Beast in the Jungle is the most complete inversion of an adven- ture story in literary history, and a logical way to close off the century of the adventure novel. In a way, Henry James did for literature what Freder- ick Jackson Turner had done to the frontier at the Columbian Exposition ten years earlier. Yet James' parody of the adventure genre remains part of the literary canon, while the admittedly lurid texts he satirized enjoy only an ignominious existence in special collections and archives. The eclipse of the genre is evident, too, in the contrast between the popularity Fried- rich Gerstacker enjoyed in the nineteenth century and his almost complete disappearance from sight today.The publication of Streif- und Jagdzuge durch die Vereinigten Sta- aten Nord-Amerikas in 1844 (translated as Wild Sports in the Far West) drew attention to Gerstacker's sojourn in rural Arkansas, where he had spent the most important years of his life and the formative period of his writing career. Wild Sports prepared the ground for the publication of his most popular adventure novels, Regulatoren in Arkansas (1846) and Die Fluspiraten des Mississippi (1848).2 Though there were popular transla- tions of James Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott before Gerstacker, Reg- ulatoren and Fluspiraten were in many ways the first German adventure novels. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, with the adventure novel losing ground to other genres, they ended up, like other texts of the kind, being reprinted only in abridged editions to make them conform to adolescent novel standards.This article will trace some of the salient features of the nine- teenth-century adventure novel as illustrated in Gerstacker's original texts, which have been made available again over the past decade by the Friedrich-Gerstacker-Gesellschaft in Germany. The argumentation fol- lows a predominantly historical and biographical search for influences and contacts. These encompass: the initial indebtedness of Gerstacker's historical adventures in Arkansas to his reading of Cooper while he was still in Germany; the impact of experiences and events in North Ameri- ca, especially in Arkansas; contact with texts by contemporary American writers; and the reception of Gerstacker's works in Germany.Even though it has been more than thirty years since literary histo- riography started its turn from concentrating on a work's aesthetic value toward focusing on its cultural and historical environments, the adventure genre still does not fare well with critics.3 In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, it was arguably the most popular and exciting subgenre of the novel, drawing on a number of tributaries for sources and inspira- tion. Travelogues by merchants and researchers and the historical novel as invented by Walter Scott combined forces with the medieval epic in their participation in the adventurous, taking the early nineteenth-century bourgeois risk culture on excursions into the unheard of and to territories where few had ventured before, there to meet with old as well as new dangers.Among the differences from the epic tale were several relative rever- sals in size and scope. The hero of the nineteenth-century adventure novel did not have to be an aristocrat any longer, but his demeanor, courage, and moral behavior were certainly on a par with the knights of old. …
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