SOURCE: "Incest and Imitation in Cooper's Home As Found," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. XXXII, No. 3, December, 1977, pp. 261-84.

In the essay that follows, Sundquist claims that the interaction between authority and imitation structures the plot of Home as Found.

Cooper is best known for exploring in the Leatherstocking tales that "area of possibility," in the words of R. W. B. Lewis, represented by the American frontier.¹ Still, no one would deny that his dramatizations can be both penetrating and ludicrous on the same page, that the frontier can at times become an area of impossibility populated by stick figures mouthing stylized handbook creeds. In the case of the Leatherstocking novels we quietly utter the word "romance" and tend to forgive, if only to salvage Natty Bumppo as the totem of our literature. What to do with Cooper's "Silk Stocking Tales,"² as Arvid Schulenberger calls Homeward Bound (1838) and Home...