The Monikins is an 1835 novel, written by James Fenimore Cooper. The novel, a beast fable, was written between his composition of two of his more famous novels from the Leatherstocking Tales, The Prairie and The Pathfinder.[1] The critic Christina Starobin compares the novel's plot to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.[1] The novel is a satire, narrated by the main character, the English Sir John Goldencalf. Goldencalf and the American captain Noah Poke travel on a series of humorous adventures to an Antarctic archipelago inhabited by a race of civilized monkeys.[2]

The novel is not very popular with Cooper's readers.[2] A contemporary critic of the novel in The Knickerbocker described it with great disappointment.[3]

References

  1. ^ a b Starobin, Christina (1991). George A. Test (ed.). The Monikins. James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art (No. 8). State University of New York College – Oneonta and Cooperstown. pp. 108–123 – via James Fenimore Cooper Society.
  2. ^ a b Michaelsen, Scott (Autumn 1992). "Cooper's Monikins: Contracts, Construction, and Chaos" (PDF). Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory. 48 (3): 1–26. doi:10.1353/arq.1992.0015. S2CID 161086612.
  3. ^ Washington Irving, ed. (1853). "Literary Notices: The Monikins". The Knickerbocker: Or, New-York Monthly Magazine: 152–153 – via Google Books.

External links


Works by James Fenimore Cooper
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