The Sea Lions Or The Lost Sealers

The Sea Lions (1849) is the twelfth and last of Cooper's sea novels, a genre he largely invented. Drawing upon memories from nearly three decades earlier of his own ventures in whaling and his reviews of accounts of exploring and hunting in cold seas, Cooper fashioned an exciting tale of two small vessels capturing seals near the Antarctic Circle. When the sealers are trapped by the ice and forced to winter over in extreme conditions, Cooper's hero undergoes a spiritual transformation amidst the sublime threat of hostile Nature. The editors argue that this transformation parallels Cooper's gradual shift from a religion of Nature to his embracing Trinitarian Christianity. In expanding the scope of his sea fiction to embrace spiritual questions, Cooper anticipates Melville, who reviewed the novel favorably. This scholarly edition, the thirtieth in The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper series, presents an accurate text that draws upon both the American first edition and the British first edition, for which the editors have determined Cooper provided some revisions not found in his American text. The edition provides extensive historical, cultural, and geographic explanatory notes. The editors also provide a full scholarly apparatus discussing their editorial choices, and the edition has been approved by scholarly peers in the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association.

James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the first half of the 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. The Sea Lions, originally published in 1849, tells the story of two ships seeking seals among the icebergs of Antarctica, and caught there during the long winter night.

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