A Repossession of America: The Revolution in Cooper's Trilogy of Nautical Romances

Peck, H. Daniel

doi:10.2307/25600051

Cited by 5 publications

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“…19. Cooper's readers have struggled much with assessing his representation of the U.S.-American revolution. While Peck (1976) emphasizes Cooper's ambivalence, Robert Clark draws a more negative picture; he explains that after 1776, radicalism threatened the nation's interests: "A society based on the universal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and convinced of the right of its own citizens to possess what they have amassed, did not wish to remember that its Independence was achieved by subordinating its cherished principles to the higher ethical and pragmatic concerns of a violent revolutionary war" (1985,202). 20.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pirate Narratives and the Revolutionary Atlantic in the Early Republic and the Antebellum Period

Ganser

2020

Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy

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The early American Republic and the first half of the nineteenth century were obsessed with what Henry Steele Commager ([1965] 1967) famously called the "search for a usable past" (in reference to literary critic Van Wyck Brooks's 1918 essay "On Creating a Usable Past") and the cultural construction of the "imagined community" (B. Anderson) of U.S.-American citizens to create and consolidate a national identity. In both literature and the wider field of cultural production, including festivities and a memorial culture, American history and its accompanying mythologies became useful resources for the creation of a national culture and literature which sought to distance itself from a British heritage. On the one hand, writers of literature reverted to the specific American theme of cultural contact with indigenous populations (whose extinction was euphemized as the downfall of the 'noble savage,' doomed by an allegedly superior civilization, most prominently in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales); on the other, the evocation of the American Revolution as well as her maritime strength in commerce and war was a standard tool, especially in the historical romance, to cement heroic narratives of freedom-fighting Americans and to activate, rejuvenate, and actualize a shared memory. The entire post-revolutionary period, according to Daniel Williams, was marked by a celebration of

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%