July 23, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: James Fenimore Cooper

[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125^th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On historical and literary reasons to revisit a challenging early bestseller.

Given the fact that my Dad’s first book was an extended analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s career and life, it’s somewhat shameful how little I’ve written about Cooper in my nearly 14 years of blogging (although given that my Dad’s analysis was based on a psychoanalytical interpretation of Cooper’s relationship with his father, maybe the absence is also a telling one!). But I have to admit that when it comes to Cooper’s style, I tend to agree with Mark Twain (another of my Dad’s subjects—ah what a tangled web we AmericanStudiers weave!) and his thorough takedown in the satirical essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895). Style is always a matter of taste to some degree, but Cooper’s is nonetheless unquestionably clunky from a 21^st century perspective (even more so than it was to Twain’s late 19^th century one). And at the very least, Cooper’s ponderous prose makes it difficult for me to recommend him to either my students (I’ve occasionally in my first-half American Lit Survey taught the one chapter from Last of the Mohicans that’s included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but that’s it) or broader audiences.

At the same time, no early 19^th century author reads like one of our contemporaries, and of course I’d still make the case for the value of reading literary texts from that period. A significant part of that value is what these works and authors can help us see in our histories, and Cooper in particular has a great deal to tell us about how our national myths developed in the decades after the Revolution and how those collective American stories engaged with Native American histories and communities. All of the so-called “Leatherstocking Tales” in particular—the five novels that, taken together and read in story rather than publication order, follow protagonist Natty Bumppo from the 1740s through his death in the early 19^th century—offer a strikingly broad and deep window into those historical themes, as Bumppo is both instrumental in the development of the American frontier (before, during, and after the Revolution) and closely tied to the Native American communities for whom that “frontier” was much more of a slow-moving invasion. While Cooper never fully captures the Native American perspective on those themes, as I’ve argued his contemporary novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick briefly but importantly managed to, his books unquestionably represent a significant literary and cultural layer to those fraught histories.

We’ve got a name for works of fiction that represent histories, of course, and for one of the preeminent scholars of that genre Cooper was a truly towering figure: the Russian critic Georg Lukács writes about Cooper a great deal (far more than he does any other American writer, in fact) in his groundbreaking work The Historical Novel (1955). Lukács traces the genre’s origins to the English novelist Sir Walter Scott, and sees Cooper (as Cooper likewise saw himself) as Scott’s American heir and Natty Bumppo as a close parallel to Scott’s most famous protagonist Edward Waverly. And even for folks who aren’t the slightest bit interested in either Georg Lukács or Walter Scott, I’d argue that we all remain fascinated by the genre of historical fiction, as illustrated for example by two of the year’s most popular TV shows, Shōgun and Bridgerton. No American author from any period has been more interested in exploring how fiction can represent histories than was James Fenimore Cooper, and so for literary and cultural as well as historical reasons I believe it’s well worth wading into that challenging prose.

Next CanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?