James Fenimore Cooper Versus The Cult Of Domesticity

Between 1820 and 1860 a set of established cultural values deemed the "Cult of Domesticity" sought to shape the private and public lives of individuals in a rapidly changing American society. Promoting the ideals of conformity in religious, domestic and personal development, the cult was particularly concerned with maintaining a status quo of piety, purity, obedience and domesticity in 19th century female behavior. While a number a female writers responded through literature to the social standards they were urged to emulate, the prominent male writer James Fenimore Cooper reacted as well, addressing the predominant cultural climate through texts that establish women as an integral part of the plot line. This book provides a comprehensive discussion of James Fenimore Cooper's view of family dynamics and explores his attempts to simultaneously present and critique the forces shaping the social development of the nation. The study places 10 relevant Cooper novels within the context of popular literary works by 19th century writers Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner and Maria Cummins to demonstrate how Cooper approaches issues of Victorian domesticity and how his representations compare to those crafted by the contemporary women writers. Opening chapters discuss why Cooper chose the women's fiction genre as his vehicle and present an overview of the "Cult of Domesticity" in fiction and nonfiction, delineating the origins and effects of 19th century domestic life. Remaining chapters address the role of the mother, the father and the central daughter figure in domestic fiction.

Although often overlooked today, James Fenimore Cooper's novels represent the very beginnings of American literature. Singlehandedly, the gentleman farmer from upstate New York created the American historical, spy, sea, frontier, science fiction, and courtroom novels. His books became both national and international bestsellers, were quickly translated into other languages, and impacted the development of the American publishing industry. This literary companion is a useful resource covering the major themes, characters, settings and more found in Cooper's works. It includes an overview of his fiction; a brief biography; a chronological list of his major publications; and topics for discussion, research, and study.

James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy are two of the most celebrated and influential writers of the American West. Both have written powerful narratives that focus on the disappearance of the nineteenth century frontier, and both show an interest in the dramatic ways in which the frontier gave shape to American culture. But is it possible that the kinship between these two writers extends beyond simply sharing an interest in this subject? Teasing out the implications of the recurrent allusions to Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales in the pages of McCarthy’s Southwestern novels, this book finds Cooper and McCarthy engaged in a complex legal and ethical dialogue despite the centuries that separate their lives and their work. The result of their dialogue is a provocative, nuanced analysis of the effects of the frontier on the American justice system – and, for both writers, an expression of alarm at the violation of the principles upon which the system was established.

A cosmopolitan author who spent nearly a decade in Europe and was versed in the works of his British and French contemporaries, James Fenimore Cooper was also deeply concerned with the America of his day and its history. His works embrace themes that have dominated American literature since: the frontier; the oppression of Native Americans by Europeans; questions of race, gender, and class; and rugged individualism, as represented by figures like the pirate, the spy, the hunter, and the settler. His most memorable character, Natty Bumppo, has entered into American popular culture. The essays in this volume offer students bridges to Cooper's novels, which grapple with complex moral issues that are still crucial today. Engaging with film adaptations, cross-culturalism, animal studies, media history, environmentalism, and Indigenous American poetics, the essays offer new ways to bring these novels to life in the classroom.

In this interdisciplinary study, Faherty argues that throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled political and social states through metaphors of home building. During this period, a pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses helped writers to manage previous encounters with settlements, both native and European, and to imagine and remodel a new national ideal. By aligning the period’s architectural concerns (registered in both the interior and exterior of houses) with concurrent debates about the need to create a national identity in the wake of the American Revolution, Faherty registers how representations of the house were a crucial locus for debating broadly shared concerns about the anxieties of nation building. Topics include Abraham Lincoln’s use of architectural motifs in his 1858 senatorial campaign (the “house divided against itself ” speech); the arguments about domestic identity embodied in the designs of Mount Vernon and Monticello; the lingering import of colonial and indigenous settlements on post-revolutionary culture as registered in the work of William Bartram and Lewis and Clark; Charles Brockden Brown’s representations of the multivalent legacies of Pennsylvania’s architectural landscapes; Washington Irving’s attempts to preserve and remodel national architectural and literary practices by underscoring the manufactured nature of European cultural production; the shifting importance of the house and American attitudes toward nature in the work of three generations of the Cooper family; and the gendering of domestic space in the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Richly informed by contemporary work in literary studies, history, art history, and cultural criticism, Remodeling the Nation ranges incisively across the work of political theorists, social critics, novelists, poets, natural historians, landscape artists, travel writers, and authors of architectural and domestic treatises.

The Last of the Mohicans enjoyed tremendous popularity both in America and abroad, offering its readers not only a variation on the immensely popular traditional captivity narrative of the time, but also characters that would become iconic figures in the young nation’s emerging literature. The novel’s central action follows Leatherstocking and his two faithful friends, Chingachgook and Uncas, as they come to the aid of two daughters of a British officer seeking to become reunited with their father. The novel provides insights into Cooper’s own thinking on Native American and White relations during the early national period, revealing a profound ambivalence to the reality that the rising fortunes of the young United States meant the declining fortunes of the nation’s Native American inhabitants.

Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English at Sussex University, gathers here seventeen of his literary essays which were previously published in a diversity of locations. The authors discussed include: Shakespeare, Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Maupassant, Kipling, O. Henry, Anthony Hope, Conan Doyle, John Buchan, John Galsworthy, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Graham Greene.