Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- THE LITERATURE OF COLONIZATION
- NEW ENGLAND PURITAN LITERATURE
- BRITISH-AMERICAN BELLES LETTRES
- THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT, 1750–1820
- THE LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIODS
- 1 Letters of the Early Republic
- 2 Magazines, Criticism, and Essays
- 3 The Drama
- 4 Poetry
- 5 The Novel
- 6 Charles Brockden Brown
- 7 Washington Irving
- 8 James Fenimore Cooper
- Chronology
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - James Fenimore Cooper
from THE LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIODS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- THE LITERATURE OF COLONIZATION
- NEW ENGLAND PURITAN LITERATURE
- BRITISH-AMERICAN BELLES LETTRES
- THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT, 1750–1820
- THE LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIODS
- 1 Letters of the Early Republic
- 2 Magazines, Criticism, and Essays
- 3 The Drama
- 4 Poetry
- 5 The Novel
- 6 Charles Brockden Brown
- 7 Washington Irving
- 8 James Fenimore Cooper
- Chronology
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
No American Writer was ever more conscious of founding a national tradition in letters than James Fenimore Cooper. As early as his second book, The Spy (1821), Cooper realized that in constituting himself the novelist equivalent of the Founding Fathers, he was making his principal bid for immortality. Yet few of Cooper's contemporaries in that era of new beginnings felt as uncertain as he did about the act of origination. In part his problem was the relatively simple one of finding a form and a setting for his fiction. But this problem encoded the more vexing one of whether Cooper – to schematize for the moment – was to be a “republican” or a “liberal” novelist, an author whose goals were social and patriotic or one who pursued primarily aesthetic ends. Behind this question lay the related issue of professionalization. How would Cooper accommodate himself to the commercial processes transforming the identity of the writer?
This literary pioneer reconceptualized his genre. Much like Irving, he reversed the emphases of the civic-humanist paradigm that governed the writing of fiction for the first quarter century of the Republic's existence. To the preceding generation, fiction was “truth” or history; to Cooper, history was fiction. By reimagining the novel as a subjective art form that would appeal to postrepublican readers, not as a moral discourse in narrative, Cooper affiliated his writing with the new social order.
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- The Cambridge History of American Literature , pp. 676 - 694Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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