last of the mohicans

so i bought the barnes and boble classic version of the last of the mohicans by james fenimore cooper and that means after the story there are notes that a professor has written to help you along the story. usually there's a time gap from when the book was written to today, so the notes are really just to help with loctions or maybe the author quotes another book form the time; and the notes in the back just help explain what the quotes was. well at the beginning of every chapter in the book there is a quote from poetry or verse drama, like shakespears plays. and there's a note about it in the back of the book. the note says: "american novelists of this era widely employed the convention of using passages from poetry of verse drama as chapter epigraphs in prose ficiton. the procatice followed the example of the scottish novelist walter scott and helped give novels (still considered a frivolous form of reading) the veneer of higher culture - which is why so many epigraphs are taken from canonical writers like shakespeare." now i thought this was interesting. that fiction novels were considered a low art of literature and that people needed to quote shakespeare at the beginning of chapters to make it more worth wild to read. that just blows my mind. i guess its because today literature is considered a higher art. espically a book like last of the mohicans. for today it is considered a classic and one (by most critics) that is thought of as a book that everyone should read. i know critics don't know what they are talking about, but it still blew my mind about how authors would put quotes from other works to make their book better.

i know that really dosen't have anything to do with my book. but it does. in the sence that i wouldn't put quotes in the beginning of my chapters unless there's some message i wanted to convay with those quotes. i wouldn't try to to just put them there for to try to make it a higher art. but i don't have to anymore. literature writing is considered a higher art.