Environmentální Průkopníci (1823) Jamese Fenimora Coopera ve světle literární ekokritiky

The aim of the paper is to discover to what extent and in which respects James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers (1823) can be regarded as the forerunner of American environmental literature, preceding thus Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), which is usually considered as the foundational text. As a classification frame, the paper employs Lawrence Buell’s set of interrelated imaginative structures of ecocentric literary vision. The results of the examination indicate that out of the five imaginative structures of environmental literature, Relinquishment, Nature’s Personhood, Nature’s Face and Mind’s Eye: Seasons, Sense of Place, and Environmental Apocalypticism, all are at work and display a distinctive ecocentric orientation in the novel but with a different degree of intensity and frequency.