rules governing romantic fiction (Cooper & Twain...and Pynchon too?)

[alice wellintown]

On this day in 1841 James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer was
published. This was the last-written of the five Leatherstocking
novels, though it covers the earliest phase of the saga, that part
wherein the twenty-three-year-old Natty Bumppo must pass his first
tests in the wilderness, rise above the worst of paleface and redskin
ethics, avoid being burned at the stake, return to Chingachgook his
beloved Wah-ta!-Wah ("which rendered into English means
Hist-oh!-Hist") and, to the fetching Judith's despair, explain the
whereabouts of his own true love:

She's in the forest-hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft
rain-in the dew on the open grass -- the clouds that float about in
the blue heavens-the birds that sing in the woods -- the sweet springs
where I slake my thirst-and in all the other glorious gifts that come
from God's Providence!
This sort of talk, and the taste for it among scholars and the reading
public, so riled up Mark Twain that in 1895 he published an article
entitled "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences." Twain found The
Deerslayer guilty of breaking eighteen of his nineteen rules for
romantic fiction, including Rule Three: "that the personages in a tale
shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the
reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."


http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/27/2010

http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/rissetto/offense.html