Summary

This is the first book-length study to show how Cooper uses the Leath-erstocking series as a touchstone to ex-plore pre-Civil War America's perception of its past. Kelly's historiographic approach to the "Tales "marks a significant departure from previous critical commentary on the sto-ries: Other critics have centered either on the "Tales' "mythological status, on their relevance for an understanding of Jack-sonian America, or on their aesthetic preconceptions. Kelly begins his innova-tive study by challenging the assumption that American writers of the eighteenth century lacked native models for their fiction. He argues that rather than a void, Americans confronted two competing patterns of historical vision. In docu-ments as diverse as John Winthrop's "Jour-nal, "the Declaration of Independence, Emerson's "Essays, "and Lincoln's Second Inaugural, America is imagined as simul-taneously free and bound, as a nation at once independent from history and or-ganically linked to centuries of human development. Kelly shows that Cooper's fiction illustrates this characteristic perception of the past with an unparalleled clarity. Neither a defense of tradition nor an assault on entailment, his novels plot American history as a progressive devel-opment in the continuum of human events and as a departure from that process.