Novel, October 1st, 2006
As scholars from Leslie Fiedler to Philip Fisher have demonstrated, James Fenimore Cooper's frontier fiction lends itself to allegorical readings about the founding of a nation at once masculine and American in origin. An obvious tautology informs all such readings: if novels are about history-or should be, in order to qualify as the genuine American article-then we must look to history to tell us what these novels are about. Besides marginalizing so much of the fiction actually produced and consumed in the early republic', reading to validate our historical preconceptions is further disadvant...
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