Subject Index

This index categorizes articles included in this section of the website by their relevance to a variety of themes significant to Cooper readers and scholars. The categories are subjective, and limited by space — only articles dealing very significantly with the subjects concerned are included. There are some duplicate entries.

Biography and Family

Axelrad, Allan M. (California State University at Fullerton), Epiphany at Ischia: The Effect of Italy on James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Landscape Painting. How Cooper fell in love with Italian scenery, learned to tell picturesque from sublime, and feared the wilderness.
Axelrad, Allan M. (California State University at Fullerton), Susan Fenimore Cooper, “The Lumley Autograph,” and James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Legacy. The Cooper family deals with the 19ᵗʰ century autograph craze, in life and in SFC’s story.
Ball, Hon. L. Chandler (Judge, Hoosick Falls, N.Y.), The Real “Natty” an Elder Brother. Claim (ca. 1870, oft-repeated, but unsubstantiated) that one Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., was the original for Cooper’s Natty Bumppo.
Baym, Max I. (Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute) and Percy Matenko (Brooklyn College), The Odyssey of The Water-Witch and a Susan Fenimore Cooper Letter. An 1886 letter to recipient of a manuscript page gives background on writing and publication of The Water-Witch, noting inter alia that Americans in 1830 Dresden were expected to be black.
Beard, James F., Jr. (Dartmouth College), Cooper and his Artistic Contemporaries Close ties, personal and in vision, between Cooper and his artistic contemporaries, notably Cole, Dunlap, Greenough, and Morse.
Becker, Robert (Independent Scholar), James Fenimore Cooper’s First Travel to Germany, and his Use of Engelmann/Reichard’s Manuel. The 1827 Engelmann/Reichard Manual, a German guidebook which Cooper used, and annotated, during his 1830 travels in Germany.
Birdsall, Rev. Ralph (Rector, Christ Episcopal Church, Cooperstown), Fenimore Cooper in Cooperstown. Local anecdotes of Cooper and his personality from oral and written sources.
Blakemore, Steven (Florida Atlantic University), Cooper, Basil Hall, and Anglo-American Cultural Wars. Cooper’s 1831 article in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, respondings to Basil Hall’s attacks on American culture and society.
Bryant, William Cullen (Poet), Discourse on the Life, Character, and Genius of James Fenimore Cooper. In Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1852), pp. 39-74. Extensive survey of Cooper’s life and writings.
Buinicki, Martin T. (University of Iowa), ’mere articles of trade’: Literary Property, Copyright, and Democracy. Cooper’s views on copyright law.
Butterfield, L[yman] H. (Princeton University), Judge William Cooper (1754-1809): A Sketch of His Character and Accomplishment. The first scholarly study of the life of James Fenimore Cooper’s father.
Butterfield, Lyman H. (Institute of Early American History and Culture), Cooper’s Inheritance: The Otsego Country and its Founders William Cooper and the early history of Otsego County.
Carso, Kerry Dean (Oneonta, New York), The Old Dwelling Transmogrified: James Fenimore Cooper’s Otsego Hall. James Fenimore Cooper’s remodelling of Otsego Hall, creating the second Gothic mansion in America.
Charvat, William (Ohio State University), Cooper as Professional Author. America’s first wholly professional writer, his publishers (especially Carey), and his income.
Cooley, Francis Rexford (Independent Scholar), William Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper, and Generations of Literary Coopers: A Family’s Literary Legacy Defining and Promoting Cooperstown.
Cooper, James Fenimore (grandson of author), William Cooper and Andrew Craig’s Purchase of Croghan’s Land. Rebuttal of Volwiler’s 1923 allegations concerning William Cooper’s 1786 acquisition of part of the “Croghan Patent”.
Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Greenough’s Chanting Cherubs. Letter to the Editor (1870) relating James Fenimore Cooper’s commissioning of Horatio Greenough’s sculpture The Chanting Cherubs.
Cooper, W[illiam] W[ager] (cousin of James Fenimore Cooper), Cooper Genealogy. Descendants of James Cooper (1661-1732), prepared in 1879; largely superseded but with extensive documentary references for earliest generations.
Crawford, James (Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery), James Fenimore Cooper and his Family in Samuel Finlay Morse’s Painting: The Gallery of the Louvre. Analysis of the Morse painting, and significance of its inclusion of the Cooper family.
Daly, Robert (University of Buffalo), Cooper’s Stoic Cosmopolitanism: Gleanings in Switzerland. In Gleanings in Europe: Switzerland and Gleanings in Europe: The Rhine, we see how, besides the glorious Alps, Cooper also gradually found a nation that could be both diverse and united; with references to recent philosophical writings by Brian Boyd, Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, Alain Badiou, and Quentin Meillassoux.
Davey, Michael J. (John Carroll University), Convention and the Limits of Biography for Literary Criticism: Fathers, Daughters, and Sentiment in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Readers should not assume that JFC’s fictional characters are based on real people (such as Hannah Cooper in Pioneers or Susan Fenimore Cooper in Mohicans); rather, his use of “sentimentalism” in Mohicans is satiric and undercut by deliberate “Gothicism.”
Denne, Constance Ayers (Baruch College, City University of New York), Cooper in Italy. Background, composition, and reception of Gleanings in Europe: Italy.
Dudley, William S. (Naval Historical Center), James Fenimore Cooper’s Ned Myers: A Life Before the Mast.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 323-329. Importance to maritime history of Cooper’s biography of an ordinary sailor.
Dunn, James Taylor (Librarian, New York State Historical Association), Troskolaski and Cooper. When a Polish refugee landed on Cooper’s doorstep in 1834, helping him proved not so easy.
Egan, Hugh (Ithaca College) Enabling and Disabling the Lake Erie Discussion: James Fenimore Cooper and Alexander Slidell Mackenzie Respond to the Perry/Elliott Controversy.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 343-350. How the famous dispute over the Battle of Lake Erie began as a discussion of facts, and ended up as an increasingly nebulous argument about words.
Ellsworth, Waldo (First National Bank of Cooperstown), Cooperstown’s First Bank. History of the Otsego County Bank, 1830-1866, one of whose principal depositors (and check writers) was James Fenimore Cooper.
Evans, Constantine (Syracuse University), James Fenimore Cooper: Young Man to Author.Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, Vol. XXIII, No. 1 (Spring 1988), pp. 57-77. The personal challenges leading to Cooper’s transformation from gentleman farmer to author.
Evans, Constantine (Syracuse University), An Unpublished Reminiscence of James Fenimore Cooper.Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, Vol. XXIV, No. 2 (Fall 1989), pp. 45-53. Transcription and commentary on a short manuscript by Chemistry Professor William Mather (1802-1890), recounting his impressions of Cooper during a visit to Cooperstown in 1844.
Evans, Constantine (Syracuse University), Fenimore Cooper’s Libel Suits.Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, Vol. XXVII, No. 2 (Fall 1992), pp. 47-74. Analysis of Cooper’s libel suits against William Holt Averell and James Watson Webb.
Foulon, Jacqueline (Université de Paris), A Letter to His Countrymen. An analysis of Cooper’s message.
Francis, Dr. John W. (Cooper’s friend and physician), Reminiscences of Cooper. In Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1852), pp. 94-103. An account of Cooper’s death, and memories of the Bread and Cheese Club, and Cooper’s interest in theatre and music.
Franklin, Wayne (Northeastern University), The Last of the Coopers. Significance of James Cooper’s 1826 legal change of his name to James Fenimore Cooper.
Franklin, Wayne (Northeastern University), Introduction: Becoming James Fenimore Cooper.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 299-314. Overview of the biographic study of Cooper; biographic, psychological and literary aspects of Cooper’s 1826 assumption of “Fenimore” as a middle name.
Franklin, Wayne (Northeastern University), Cooper as Passenger.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 351-357. How Cooper’s favored status as a Captain’s protegé on the Stirling in 1806-07 affected his attitudes towards the sea both in his life and in novels such as Homeward Bound. (1838).
Franklin, Wayne (University of Connecticut), “Everything was Subordinated to Him”: Cooper’s Resistance to Lafayette. Keynote Address. Cooper and Lafayette.
Franklin, Wayne (University of Connecticut). Cooper in the Netherlands. Cooper’s Visits to the Netherlands and Belgium (1828, 1830, 1832) and his writings about New Netherland, especially The Water-Witch (1830).
Grossman, James (Lawyer and biographer), Cooper and the Responsibility of the Press. American freedom threatened by public opinion and an unscrupulous press; Cooper’s libel suits, Home as Found, and The American Democrat.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), James Fenimore Cooper and The Crater. Cooper fascination with practical farming, exemplified in his letter on potato blight to The Cultivator, is clearly reflected in “The Crater.”
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Cooper’s Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief as a Defense of Authoriship. This work marks a change in Cooper’s authorial style to the first person, and despite the unusual narrator may in some respects be considered as symbolically autobiographical in fact.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee), What Happened to Cooper’s Sixth Leatherstocking Tale?. Did Cooper ever plan a Natty Bumppo novel set during the American Revolution?
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), The Tortured Profession of Authorship: Novelist Again. Chapter 1 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s controversial re-entry into the realm of fiction-writing with Homeward Bound and Home as Found after his supposed “retirement” in 1834; his exploration of the ethics of authorship in his 1838 Knickerbocker Magazine critique of Sir Walter Scott.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Periodical Publication: Cooper and Graham’s Magazine. Chapter 4 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s experiments with magazine writing and his experiences in publishing his “Sketches of Naval Men” (Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers), Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, and Islets of the Gulf (Jack Tier).
Harthorn, Steven P. (Williams Baptist College), James Fenimore Cooper, Carey, Lea & Blanchard, and the Fable of the Indulgent Publisher. Cooper’s relations with his principal publisher.
Iglesias, Luis A. (University of Southrn Mississippi), James Fenimore Cooper as Art Critic and Connoisseur. Cooper and the Fine Arts.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Cooperstown’s Cooper. How Cooperstown influenced Cooper, and was reflected in his works.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Eclipse and Rebirth: The Four Incarnations of James Fenimore Cooper. Solar eclipses — real and imagined — illustrate how Cooper “remade” himself in moments of personal crisis, adopting a new outward persona.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Making a Place Historic: The Coopers and Cooperstown. How three generations of Coopers gave their differing visions of Cooperstown to the world. (1998)
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), James Fenimore Cooper and the Sea. Cooper as novelist of the sea, naval historian, and friend of the United States Navy. (1997)
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Book that Made Glens Falls Famous: An Introduction to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Born in the Cave at Glens Falls in 1824, Mohicans considers seriously the role of the wilderness in creating the American character, the American Indian, and the African-American. (2000)
Madison, Karen Lentz and Madison, R.D. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie: An Introduction and Annotations. Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 32, 2016. Extensive series of reference materials, and detailed notes, concerning Cooper’s The Prairie (1827).
Madison, Robert D. (Northwestern University), with Mary K. Madison (Northeastern University), Guides in the Wilderness: An Extract, Glossary, and Chart of Cooper’s Fictional and Factual Boat Journeys on Lake Ontario. Cruise of the Scud in The Pathfinder compared, in a chart, with the route taken by Cooper from Oswego to Niagara in 1809, as recorded in his biography of fellow-officer Melancthon Woolsey. With a glossary of marine terms used in The Pathfinder by Mary K. Madison.
Madison, Robert D. (US Naval Academy), Cooper, Bancroft, and the Voorhees Court Martial. Cooper’s involvement in the 1845 Voorhees court martial spurred the founding of the Naval Academy, but disillusioned Cooper with the Navy.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Cooper and the Sea: A Bibliographical Note.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 371-372. Survey of Cooper’s sea fiction and non-fiction, and of critical commentary about it.
Mann, Barbara Alice (University of Toledo). James Fenimore Cooper and ‘The Pledge.’ Cooper — who liked his glass — fights off the “tea-totallers” of his time.
Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1852). Record of memorial meetings held in New York after Cooper’s death, with a major address by William Cullen Bryant, a retrospective account of Cooper and of his death his friend and physician Dr. John W. Francis, and speeches and letters from a wide circle of literary, scholarly, and civic notables, many discussing their relationship with Cooper.
Murray, Keat (California University of Pennsylvania), Political Prattle in James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Favorite Book’: Reciprocal Readings of the A.B.C. Letters and The Monikins. The significance of The Monikins is increased when it is compared with the Cooper’s so-called “A.B.C. Letters” and placed in the context of contemporary American politics.
Peck, H. Daniel (University of California at Santa Barbara), Place into Space: from The Pioneers to The Deerslayer. Otsego Lake as the center of Cooper’s imagination.
Peprnik, Michal (Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic), Moravian Origins of J. F. Cooper’s Indians. Cooper’s Indians are based on the works of Moravian Missionary John Heckewelder.
Philbrick, Thomas L. (University of Pittsburgh), Cooper Country in Fiction. Significance of place in Cooper’s fiction, especially in the four “Otsego novels.”
Pickering, James H. (Michigan State University), New York in the Revolution: Cooper’s Wyandotté. Cooper’s local historical sources for the novel, depicting the Revolution in central New York as a civil war.
Pickering, James H. (Michigan State University), Fenimore Cooper in Our Time. James F. Beard’s new Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper is an exemplary compilation casting important new light on Cooper’s life, character, and thought.
Pickering, James A. (Michigan State University), Cooper’s Otsego Heritage: The Sources of The Pioneers. Sources in Cooperstown local history.
Pickering, James H. (University of Houston), Fenimore Cooper as Country Gentleman: A New Glimpse of Cooper’s Westchester Years. Contrary to his public image as a happy gentlman, Cooper was undergoing desperate financial difficulties resulting in a serious breach with his wife’s family.
Philbrick, Thomas L. (University of Pittsburgh), Cooper in Europe: The Travel Books. Background to the five travel books.
Rumbinas, Barbara & Mazur, Zygmunt (Jagiellonian University, Poland). Adam Mickiewicz and James Fenimore Cooper: A Reappraisal. Explores the friendship between Cooper and the Polish poet and nationalist Adam Mickiewicz.
Rumbinas, Barbara and Mazur, Zygmunt (Jagiellonian University), Adam Mickiewicz: A Catalyst for James Fenimore Cooper’s Support for Polish Independence. Influence of Mickiewicz on Cooper.
Rosenthall, Karen (Rice University). Exploring the Alliances of Political Economy: The Financial Panic of 1819 and The Last of the Mohicans. Deeply affected by the financial collapse of 1819, Cooper looks to the past for guidance as to the future.
Scannavini, Anna (Università dell’Aquila), Cooper’s Italian Seas. The varied significance to Cooper of the seas around Italy.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper’s Attitude toward England. Cooper’s complex reactions, reflected in Notions of the Americans, Gleanings in Europe: England, and, much more ambiguously, in his fiction.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper Revises the First Great American Novel. Cooper’s careful revisions of The Spy over many years.
Schachterle, Lance, (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper, the Federalists, and the Aristocrats. Cooper’s private correspondence about Federalists and their Whig descendants, and about aristocrats, shows that he is strongly critical of both groups.
Taylor, Alan (Boston University), Who Murdered William Cooper? The family tradition of William Cooper’s murder, accepted by generations of biographers and critics, is without foundation; William Cooper died a peaceful and natural death.
Taylor, Alan (University of California at Davis), Who was Elizabeth Cooper? What the sparse materials reveal of James Fenimore Cooper’s apparently often unhappy and reclusive mother.
Thorp, Willard (Princeton University), Cooper Beyond America. European enthusiasm for Cooper’s novels.
Viñuela Angulo, Urbano (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain), La Polémica de James Fenimore Cooper con la prensa norteamericana a principios del siglo XIX. Cooper’s controversies with the Whig Press.
Volwiler, A[lbert] T. (Ph. D.), George Croghan and the Development of Central New York, 1763-1800. The efforts of George Croghan, Indian agent and land speculator, to establish a settlement centered on Lake Otsego, and of William Cooper’s eventual acquisition of much of the “Croghan Patent”.
Von Mehren, Ann (Arcadia University/University of Houston, James Fenimore Cooper and the Americanization of the Bible: A Rhetorical Analysis of the American Bible Society Founding Address of May 1816. How the Bible was “Americanized” at meeting Cooper attended.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University), The Importance of Flotsam and Jetsam in Editing the Unpublished Letters of James Fenimore Cooper. Problems of locating; Cooper’s handwriting, spelling, and punctuation; survey of newly found letters.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University), The Case of the Missing Corpus: Or, More Flotsam and Jetsam in Editing Fenimore Cooper. Tracking down new Cooper letters.
Wallace, David Shane (American University in Bulgaria). Copway’s Homage to Cooper: Redefining the ‘Vanishing American,’. George Copway (1818-1869), a traveled and literary Ojibwa Indian, honors the elderly Cooper.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), Race and Spiritualism in Satanstoe. A partially cancelled authorial footnote about an African-American psychic medium in Cooperstown illustrates the cultural tensions surrounding the representation of race in the novel.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), Cooper on Corporal Punishment. Flogging, whether at sea or of a slave, is morally corrupting to the flogger.
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia), Two Americans Abroad: The Italian Soggiorni of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville; or, Travel as a Literary Act. Following the two authors’ steps through Rome, as seen through Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe: Italy and Melville’s Journal and Correspondence.
Whitehill, Walter Muir (Boston Athenaeum), Cooper as a Naval Historian. Importance of Cooper’s Naval History.
Wickes, W.K. (Principal, Syracuse High School), Prefatory Notes to The Last of the Mohicans. Critical preface to The Last of the Mohicans, New York: MacMillan, 1899.
Wright, Nathalia (University of Tennessee), The Chanting Cherubs: Horatio Greenough’s Marble Group for James Fenimore Cooper. Genesis, reception, significance, and disappearance of statue commissioned by Cooper.

Cooper as Literary Artist

Alicino, Nicholas J. (SUNY-Oneonta), Character Development in Natty Bumppo. Paper originally given in George Test’s Cooper Course at SUNY-Oneonta, in January 1979. Viewing the Leatherstocking Novels in their biographically-chronological order, rather than in the order written, nevertheless presents a coherent and persuasive portrait of Natty Bumppo’s developing character.
Arch, Steven (Michigan State University), Cooper: The Arabesque and the Grotesque. Grotesque and Arabesque, especially in The Monikins (the whole Antarctic portion) and Homeward Bound (the North African castaways portion).
Ashley, Leonard R.N. (Brooklyn College, City University of New York), The Onomastics of Cooper’s Verbal Art in The Deerslayer and Elsewhere. Conscious artistry in Cooper’s use of names compensates for his other literary faults.
Axelrad, Allan M. (California State University at Fullerton), Epiphany at Ischia: The Effect of Italy on James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Landscape Painting. How Cooper fell in love with Italian scenery, learned to tell picturesque from sublime, and feared the wilderness.
Baveystock, Freddy (Oxford University), Probable Fictions and Improbable Truths: The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, Notions of the Americans and Cooper’s Quarrel with History. Cooper’s views of the relationship between fiction and history, and of the nature of truth.
Beard, James F., Jr. (Dartmouth College), Cooper and his Artistic Contemporaries Close ties, personal and in vision, between Cooper and his artistic contemporaries, notably Cole, Dunlap, Greenough, and Morse.
Buchenau, Barbara (University of Goettingen, German), ’Wizards of the West’? How Americans respond to Sir Walter Scott, the ‘Wizard of the North’. How Cooper diverged from Scott and European writers, and Child (Hobomok) and Sedgwick (Hope Leslie) carried the divergence further.
Buinicki, Martin T. (University of Iowa), ’mere articles of trade’: Literary Property, Copyright, and Democracy. Cooper’s views on copyright law.
Callahan, David (Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal), Who Hides in the Work of James Fenimore Cooper?. The significance of physical concealment in Cooper’s works, especially as exemplified in The Spy and The Pathfinder.
Callahan, David (University of Aveiro, Portugal), Containing Manhood in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. For all its outdoor adventure, The Deerslayer is in many respects a novel raising issues of interior spaces and of femininity.
Clark, Beverly Lyon (Wheaton College, Mass.), Rethinking Cora and Alice, from Dime Novels to Debby Barnes. Early “Beadle’s Dime Novel” Indian captivity tales (Ann Sophia Stehens’ Malaeska the Indian Wife (1860), Mahaska, The Indian Princess (1863), and The Indian Queen (1864), and Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s The Sagamore of Saco (1868), compared with Constance Lindsay Skinner’s modern Debby Barnes, Trader (1932), and with Cooper.
Clarke, Colin A. (George Washington University), Like a Mirror Reflecting Itself: Natty Bumppo, The Virginian, and the Fate of the American Frontier. The Last of the Mohicans prefigures the American “Western novel,” but its multiplicity of voices (heteroglossia) distinguishes it from Owen Wister’s classic “Western.”
Clavel, Marcel (Faculté des Lettres d’Aix-en-Provence), What Fenimore Cooper Has Meant and What He Still Means To Me. “A propos du centenaire de la mort de FENIMORE COOPER et du Congrès de Cooperstown de Septembre 1951: A French Tribute to James Fenimore Cooper” in Annales de la Faculé des Lettres d’Aix-en-Provence, 1956, pp. 2-8. French Cooper scholar Marcel Clavel (1894-1976) describes his life-long fascination with Cooper.
Clavel, Marcel (Faculté des Lettres d’Aix-en-Provence), Cooper’s Reputation One Century After His Death. “A propos du centenaire de la mort de FENIMORE COOPER et du Congrès de Cooperstown de Septembre 1951: A French Tribute toes of Cooper at the Present Time. Contemporary literary James Fenimore Cooper” in Annales de la Faculé des Lettres d’Aix-en-Provence, 1956, pp. 9-10. French Cooper scholar Marcel Clavel (1894-1976) pleads for a renewal of scholarly interest in Cooper.
Daly, Robert (SUNY Buffalo), From Paradox and Aporia to Cultural Hybridization and Complex Adaptive Systems: New Theories and the Us theory continues to reveal new meanings in and deepen our understanding of Cooper’s works.
Daly, Robert (SUNY Buffalo), From Glimmerglass to Mirror Neurosis: Rewiring the Brain in the Quest for American Character . In The Last of the Mohicans, characters learn from each other and from their country, as we do today.
Davey, Michael J. (John Carroll University),Convention and the Limits of Biography for Literary Criticism: Fathers, Daughters, and Sentiment in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Readers should not assume that JFC’s fictional characters are based on real people (such as Hannah Cooper in Pioneers or Susan Fenimore Cooper in Mohicans); rather, his use of “sentimentalism” in Mohicans is satiric and undercut by deliberate “Gothicism.”
Denne, Constance Ayers (Baruch College, City University of New York),Cooper’s Use of Setting in the European Trilogy.Settings in The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, and The Headsman as artistic keys to Cooper’s meaning.
Egan, Hugh (Ithaca College),Cooper’s Career in the First Person. Cooper’s “first person” writings, beginning with the biographical Ned Myers and continuting through The Redskins, in which — contrary to accepted wisdom — Hugh Littlepage’s rantings may not reflect the author’s views on the rent controversy.
Fanuzzi, Robert (St. Johns University), Empire of Tears. Cooper (and Catharine Maria Sedgwick) used a feminized historical novel to transform the Indian captivity tale into the sentimental novel.
Fiedler, Leslie A. (SUNY Buffalo), James Fenimore Cooper: The Problem of the Good Bad Writer.Cooper’s “schlock” reveals American culture’s racist, sexist, imperialist, and genocidal underside.
Garcia, John J. (California State University, Northridge),A Matter of “Improvements”; Cooper, Race, and Manuscript Alterations in the Transatlantic Revision of The Spy. Changes Cooper made in the 1831 British edition, notably concerning the Black character Caesar Thompson.
Gilbert, Margaret (Rutgers University), An Arch of Trees. Detailed criticism of Mark Twain’s denunciation of the “ark” scene in the early part of Cooper’s The Deerslayer.
Goldbæk, Henning (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Cooper and the Forest Gentleman. The Last of the Mohicans as a Bildungsroman (novel of apprenticeship) — a novel of the creation of man, with nature as an image of the historical mind.
Hall, Cynthia (University of California, Riverside), The Frontier Dilemma of “Girls Gone Wild”: Mabel Dunham’s Nineteenth-Century Wilderness Education and Sadistic Interpellation. The Pathfinder describes Mabel Dunham as a weak, passive, female demanding protection; the narrative shows her to be anything but. Nevertheless, there is no place for her on a masculine frontier.
Harthorn, Steven P. (Univeristy of Tennessee), Truth and Consequences: James Fenimore Cooper on Scott, Columbus, Bumppo, and Professional Authorship. Cooper’s assertions of dishonesty in Walter Scott, and his claims to veracity in Mercedes of Castille and The Deerslayer.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee), What Happened to Cooper’s Sixth Leatherstocking Tale?. Did Cooper ever plan a Natty Bumppo novel set during the American Revolution?
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), The Tortured Profession of Authorship: Novelist Again. Chapter 1 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s controversial re-entry into the realm of fiction-writing with Homeward Bound and Home as Found after his supposed “retirement” in 1834; his exploration of the ethics of authorship in his 1838 Knickerbocker Magazine critique of Sir Walter Scott.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Periodical Publication: Cooper and Graham’s Magazine. Chapter 4 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s experiments with magazine writing and his experiences in publishing his “Sketches of Naval Men” (Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers), Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, and Islets of the Gulf (Jack Tier).
Harthorn, Steven P. (Williams Baptist College), and others, Finding Lost Cooper Epigraphs. Articles from the Cooper Society Newsletter on tracing elusive Cooper epigraphs.
Harthorn, Steven P. (Williams Baptist College), “Plunder,” “Fixens,” and Bee Hunting: Cooper’s Manuscript Notes for The Prairie. Cooper’s brief notes inform both The Prairie and, perhaps, The Oak Openings.
House, Kay S. (San Francisco State University), Cooper’s Adaptations of Romance Conventions and Structures. Cooper understood and used, but also adapted, the long-standing traditions of the Romance.
Iglesias, Luis (University of Southern Mississippi). Narrating History in Precaution: The Genre of Masculine Sentimentality. Forecasting Cooper’s later fiction, Denbigh is both a man of feeling and a man of action.
Iglesias, Luis A. (University of Southern Mississippi), James Fenimore Cooper and the Invention of Science Fiction. Cooper’s works anticipate those of Mary Shelley, Poe, and especially Jules Verne.
Katz, Roberta Gray (DePaul University), Envisioning Icebergs: Fenimore Cooper, Louis L. Noble, and Frederic E. Church. (Abstract) Cooper’s depiction of icebergs in The Sea Lions influenced writings of Louis L Noble (1813-1882) and of Frederic E. Church (1826-1900).
Knip, Matthew (CUNY Graduate Center), Cooper’s Heroic David Gamut. A re-examination of the Last of the Mohicans music teacher.
Kowalewski, Michael (Rutgers University), Fictions of Violence in The Deerslayer. Cooper’s use of language, as word music in the tradition of the romance, should not be judged in terms of literary realism.
Kundu, Gautam (Georgia Southern University), The Twin Caves at Glans Falls: Gothic Techniques in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Gothic characteristics of the cave scenes in Chapters 5-9.
Lampe, David (Buffalo State University), Comic Cooper: Thackeray’s Burlesque of The Last of the Mohicans and The Pilot. What Cooper did with his sources, and what Thackeray did to him.
Lampe, David (Buffalo State University), A Knight of Ancient Chivalry: The Last of the Mohicans as Medieval Romance. Comparisons with Amadis de Gaule and other medieval romances.
Lampe, David (Buffalo State College), Double Dutch Delights: Irving’s Knickerbocker History and Cooper’s Water Witch. Shakespearian comedy in Irving’s “History” and Cooper’s novel.
Liu, Linda Yang (Stanford University), Minor Protagonists and Republican Heroism in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy. Significance of “minor” characters, notably Harvey Birch.
Luedecke, Patricia (Western University), Sculpted by Absence: The Passive Voice of Cooper. How Cooper makes effective use of the passive voice, notably in The Deerslayer.
Lukasik, Christopher (Boston University), The Invisible Aristocrat: Visualizing Character in Cooper’s Early Fiction. [Abstract only] In Cooper’s early novels the reading of the face is not to discover moral dissimulation, but rather social status.
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Peeling the Onion: Looking for Layers of Meaning in The Deerslayer. Nine layers of meaning, from juvenile to profound, in The Deerslayer.
Madison, Karen Lentz and Madison, R.D. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie: An Introduction and Annotations. Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 32, 2016. Extensive series of reference materials, and detailed notes, concerning Cooper’s The Prairie (1827).
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Cooper’s Columbus. Irving had already written a definitive narrative of Columbus’ voyage; in Mercedes of Castile, Cooper tried and failed to tell the story in dialogue.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Cooper and the Sea: A Bibliographical Note.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 371-372. Survey of Cooper’s sea fiction and non-fiction, and of critical commentary about it.
Mann, Barbara Alice (University of Toledo). Aunt Jane and Father Fenimore: The Jane Austen — James Fenimore Cooper Connection. Categories of similarity in the novels of Jane Austen and Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.
McWilliams, John (Middlebury College), Revolution and the Historical Novel : Cooper’s Transforming of European Tradition. The Spy and Lionel Lincoln reject the wavering European hero of Scott, Balzac, and Pushkin, but accept the notion of innate character.
Morton, Richard (McMaster University), The Double Chronology of Leatherstocking. Reading the Leatherstocking Tales in order of their publication, or in the order of Natty Bumppo’s fictional life, provides different insights; both are valid.
Morton, Richard (McMaster University), The Deerslayer: Appearance, Reality and Expectation. Chapter from an uncompleted book. Few things in the novel are what they at first seem, but in introducing Natty Bumppo as one who “is vitally aware of the often confusing interplay between appearances and realities,” Cooper provides an “admirable preparation” for the Natty of the other Leatherstocking Tales.
Morton, Richard (McMaster University), Perception and Reality: The Novelist, the Deerslayer and the ReaderDeerslayer deals with surface appearances and hidden realities.
Mosby, W. Michael (University of Memphis), The Aesthetics of History in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. Considering Cooper as a writer before photography.
Norwood, Lisa West (Drake University), Fragments, Ruins and Artifacts of the Past: The Reconstruction of Reading in The Deerslayer. Readers of the novel must call both on their own previous Leatherstocking readings, and on the words, signs, and symbols of the past presented in the book itself.
Olson, Nels E. (Michigan State University), Democracy as Failure and Refusal in Lionel Lincoln; or, the Leaguer of Boston. How Cooper uses literature (i.e., writing) to challenge established legal orders.
Person, Leland S., Jr. (Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne) The Leatherstocking Tradition in American Fiction: or, The Sources of Tom Sawyer: A Descriptive Essay. The source of Tom Sawyer, in characters, theme, and many plot details is — Cooper’s The Pioneers !
Philbrick, Thomas (University of Pittsburgh, emeritus), Cooper and the Literary Discovery of the Sea. Cooper’s eleven sea novels created the genre, and, more generally, that of environment interacting with fictional characters.
Ramos, Peter (Buffalo State University), (Never) True Romance: The Function of History and the Imagination in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper deliberately uses the romance form to present an ideal of inter-racial mixture, but concludes by deeming it historically impossible.
Rans, Geoffrey (University of Western Ontario), Ordering Leather-Stocking. Reading the Leather-Stocking Tales in the order of publication (rather than that of Natty Bumppo’s life) enhances the reader’s understanding of Cooper’s complex meanings.
Redekop, Ernest H. (University of Western Ontario), Cooper’s Emblems of History. Using landscape to portray history in The Last of the Mohicans, Satanstoe, The Heidenmauer, and The Crater (in the last, Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire).
Ringe, Donald A. (University of Kentucky), Cooper’s Mode of Expression. Cooper’s complex descriptive genius, exemplified in Lionel Lincoln, Wyandotté and especially The Pioneers.
Ringe, Donald A. (University of Kentucky), The Last of the Mohicans as a Gothic Novel. Cooper’s Americanization of the Gothic Mode in the novel and elsewhere.
Ringe, Donald A. (University of Kentucky), The Bravo : Social Criticism in the Gothic Mode. Brilliant use of Gothic literary style to depict a Republic reduced to totalitarian terr commercial greed; 18ᵗʰ century Venice in history; America (??) in the future.
Rust, Richard D., (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), The Art of The Pathfinder. The novel as a carefully crafted work of art.
Scannavini, Anna (Università dell’Aquila). Typographies of Writing in The Bravo. Cooper’s understanding and use of pre-unification Italian dialects, including that of Venice, in the novel.
Schachterle, Lance and Kent Ljungquist (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Defenses: Twain and the Text of The Deerslayer. Joel Myerson, ed., Studies in the American Renaissance 1988, pp. 401-417. Point-by-point exposé of deliberate fabrications in Mark Twain’s notorious “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895)
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper Revises the First Great American Novel Cooper’s careful revisions of The Spy over many years.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper’s Revisions for His First Major Novel, The Spy (1821-31). Analysis, with illustrations, of extensive revisions made to The Spy in 1831.
Schachterle, Lance (Editor-in-Chief, Cooper Edition; Worcester Polytechnic Institute), “Cooper and His Collaborators: Recovering Cooper’s Final Intentions for His Fiction” [Abstract only] Contrary to common belief, Cooper was very concerned with the accuracy of his printed texts.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper’s Last Experiment in Sentimental-Domestic Fiction: Tales for Fifteen About Cooper’s 1823 stories, attributed to “Jane Morgan.”
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper, Style and The Bravo. Cooper’s writing style and its sources; studies of Cooper’s style; and (in great detail) an examination of his writing style in The Bravo. [Keynote Address]
Siewers, Alfred K. (Bucknell University), Cooper’s Green World: Adapting Ecosemiotics to the Mythic Eastern Woodlands. A semiotic and philosophical examination of The Deerslayer.
Sivils, Matthew Wynn (Oklahoma State University), Bears, Culture-Crossing, and the Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper’s use of bears as symbols to discuss cross-cultural and cross-racial transitions.
Smith, Gail K. (Marquette University), Relics and Repetition in The Deerslayer. Cooper’s characters, and the reader, are constantly asked to draw uncertain conclusions from fragmentary evidence (relics), in constant patterns of repetition.
Starobin, Christina (New York University), The Monikins. Radical ideas about property, cushioned by the use of animals (from the Hindu “Ramayana”??) in Cooper’s “beast fable,” compared with The American Democrat and the Leatherstocking Tales’ Natty Bumppo.
Starobin, Christina (Culinary Institute of America), Cooper’s Theory of Relativity: Time Travel in the Leatherstocking Tales. Musings on how Cooper asks us to look at time.
Suzuki, Taisuke (Asahi University, Japan), The Background to Cooper’s Literary Works. Musings on D. H. Lawrence’s writings about Cooper.
Walker, Warren S., Plots and Characters in the Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. Archon Books/Dawson, 1978. (xi, 346 p.) © 1978, Warren S. Walker, and placed online with his permission. Detailed analysis of the plots of each of Cooper’s novels and short stories.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University). Reading Rose Budd; Or, Tough Sledding in Jack Tier. Cooper tackles serial installment writing, with changing titles and plans.
Walters, Patrick (University of Delaware), Domesticating Wilderness in The Last of the Mohicans. The dangerous animals of real wilderness are replaced by dangerous Indians, or tamed by comic treatment.
Wegener, Signe O. (The University of Georgia), Rewriting the Courtship Novel: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. A romance in which the girl doesn’t get the boy.
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia). What’s in an Accent? Cooper’s “Vanishing Scotsmen” in the Leather-Stocking Tales. Cooper’s minimal but changing use of the Scottish accent, as ethnic and class indicator.
Wickes, W.K. (Principal, Syracuse High School), Prefatory Notes to The Last of the Mohicans. Critical preface to The Last of the Mohicans, New York: MacMillan, 1899.
Zogas, Peter (University of Rochester), Reading Cooper’s Modernity. Competing temporal horizons of colonial and pre-colonial time in The Last of the Mohicans.

Economic Views

Bagby, George F. (Hampden-Sydney College), The Temptations of Pathfinder : Cooper’s Radical Critique of Ownership. Cooper’s views on property in The Pathfinder at odds with the conservative ideas expressed in the Littlepage novels.
Bender, Thomas (University of California, Davis), James Fenimore Cooper and the City. Abandoning his reliance on the rural gentleman as the backbone of society, Cooper, contrary to accepted interpretations, began by mid-century to look to the new urban commercial elite.
Buinicki, Martin T. (University of Iowa), ’mere articles of trade’: Literary Property, Copyright, and Democracy. Cooper’s views on copyright law.
Ellis, David Maldwyn (Hamilton College), The Coopers and the New York State Landholding Systems. Cooper, property, and the “anti-rent wars”; the Littlepage novels (Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins).
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), The Tortured Profession of Authorship: Novelist Again. Chapter 1 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s controversial re-entry into the realm of fiction-writing with Homeward Bound and Home as Found after his supposed “retirement” in 1834; his exploration of the ethics of authorship in his 1838 Knickerbocker Magazine critique of Sir Walter Scott.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Periodical Publication: Cooper and Graham’s Magazine. Chapter 4 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s experiments with magazine writing and his experiences in publishing his “Sketches of Naval Men” (Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers), Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, and Islets of the Gulf (Jack Tier).
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Bravo: Cooper’s Message to America. The totalitarian Venetian aristocracy exposed as a warning against economic corporate aristocracy in America.
Philbrick, Thomas (University of Pittsburgh, emeritus), Fact and Fiction: Uses of Maritime History in Cooper’s Afloat and Ashore.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 315-321. Unlike the earlier romantic sea stories, this novel is autobiographical, realistic, and very much about property.
Schramer, James J. (Youngstown State University), “A Bold Stroke against the Wilderness”: Wyandotté and Cooper’s Critique of the Jeffersonian Ideology of Domestic Production. The failure of Jeffersonian agrarianism in Wyandotté, and in Cooper’s America.
Starobin, Christina (New York University), The Monikins. Radical ideas about property, cushioned by the use of animals (from the Hindu “Ramayana”??) in Cooper’s “beast fable,” compared with The American Democrat and the Leatherstocking Tales’ Natty Bumppo.
Walker, Warren S. (Texas Tech University), Cooper’s Yorkers and Yankees in the Jeffersonian Garden. A Jeffersonian agrarian democrat confronts the commercial Yankee invasion of New York.
Wegener, Signe O. (University of Georgia) Sustenance and Colonization: Fenimore Cooper’s Culinary Excesses. “The Crater steadfastly argues that agricultural products promote and reinforce trade, colonization, and religious conversion.”
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia), Enjoying the Bounties of Nature: Food in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper and Food — especially in The Pioneers and The Pathfinder.

Environment, Nature, and Conservation

Dyer, Klay (Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada), Turning Over a New Leaf: The Literary Ecologies of Susan Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Parr Traill. A Canadian and an American naturalist/writer, working separately, created a new literary genre.
Johnson, Rochelle (Albertson College of Idaho), James Fenimore Cooper, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and the Work of History. SFC’s uses of history and natural history both differ from those of her father, and revise the dominant myths of 19ᵗʰ century America.
Johnston, Paul K. (State University of New York at Plattsburgh), A Puritan in the Wilderness: Natty Bumppo’s Language & American Nature Today. The Pioneers secularized the Puritan idea of Biblical “wilderness”, and bequeathed it to modern environmentalism.
Johnston, Paul (State University of New York at Plattsburgh), No Name for Sweet William: Rural Intimacy and Rural Estrangement in Susan Cooper and James Fenimore Cooper. For James and other Americans, Nature is to be conquered, or to be valued as a refuge; for Susan and many Europeans, Nature is an intimate part of normal human life; her discussion of flower names in Rural Hours points up this important difference.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), James Fenimore Cooper: Prophet of the Environmental Movement. Cooper, many decades ahead of his time, proclaimed the major principles of modern environmentalism. (1990)
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), “Their Waste Has Done It All”: The Prairie as a Post-Apocalyptic Novel. Natty Bumppo’s vision of the prairies as a man-created desert in which human ruins have turned to dust, just as geological science was making such a chronology conceivable, casts new ecological light on this novel.
Madison, Karen Lentz and Madison, R.D. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie: An Introduction and Annotations. Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 32, 2016. Extensive series of reference materials, and detailed notes, concerning Cooper’s The Prairie (1827).
Pikus, Michael J., (Niagara County Community College), Chopping Away at the New World: The Metaphor of the Axe in The Prairie. The axe as a symbol of destruction, in The Pioneers and The Prairie.
Scannavini, Anna (Università dell’Aquila),The Long Shadow of The Pioneers (as an Environmental Text). English laws protecting game (for the privileged) as a background to the novel.
Taylor, Alan (University of California at Davis), The Great Change Begins: Settling the Forest of Central New York The real lives of the first settlers of Otsego County (prototypes of Cooper’s The Pioneers); economic, social, and environmental.
Van Valen, Nelson (Beloit College), James Fenimore Cooper and the Conservation Schism. In The Pioneers Cooper launched both the utilitarian (Judge Temple) and preservationist (Natty Bumppo) wings of the conservation movement.
Wolfe, Steven (University of Houston), The Path to a New Environmental Consciousness in The Deerslayer. Deerslayer’s inability to protect his beloved Glimmerglass is intended “to change not only our behaviour but our entire means of thinking about the natural environment.”

Editions, Film, Drama, and Opera

Crane, James (The College of St. Scholastica). Love and Liberty: A Transatlantic Adaptation of The Pilot. Edward Ball (1792-1873), as “Fitzball” a prolific writer of English melodrama, transforms the novel into a highly successful musical burletta for a patriotic British audience.
Elliott, James P. (Clark University). The Children of Natty Bumppo: Undergraduate Responses to Cooper. Teaching Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans as novel and (Michael Mann) film.
Garcia, John J. (California State University, Northridge), A Matter of “Improvements”; Cooper, Race, and Manuscript Alterations in the Transatlantic Revision of The Spy. Changes Cooper made in the 1831 British edition, notably concerning the Black character Caesar Thompson.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Northwestern-St. Paul), Illustrated Editions of Cooper’s The Spy: A Survey. The many, many illustrations, from many countries, of Cooper’s The Spy.
Kelly, Thomas O., II (Siena College), Whites and Indians and White Indians: The Last of the Mohicans from James Fenimore Cooper to Daniel Day Lewis. Despite its proclaimed “sensitivity,” the 1992 film, like its predecessors and the novel, and reflecting American values, remains ambivalent about Native Americans.
Madison, Karen Lentz and Madison, R.D. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie: An Introduction and Annotations. Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 32, 2016. Extensive series of reference materials, and detailed notes, concerning Cooper’s The Prairie (1827).
Starobin, Christina (Culinary Institute of America), Falsification of the Past: Cooper’s Legacy Reexamined and Reclaimed. Musings on Cooper, from Leatherstocking Tales death scenes to today’s film and television.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University), Deconstructing an American Myth: Hollywood and The Last of the Mohicans. The films have “rewritten Cooper’s plot, miscast and mislabeled his characters, modernized his dialogue, misunderstood his themes, and misrepresented history.”
Wegener, Signe O. (University of Georgia), Not Really the Last Mohican: Chingachgook and East Germany’s Indian Movement. Why it was Communist East Germany that made the most recent (and perhaps best) film version of The Deerslayer.
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia), Visual Representation and Political Propaganda: or, How James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer became the 1967 Indianerfilm Chingachgook, Die Grosse Schlange. How the Communist East German Regime made a film version of The Deerslayer.

Gender Issues and Women

Bower, Anne L. (Ohio State University, Marion), Resisting Women: Feminist Students and Cooper’s The Pioneers, with a Few Thoughts Concerning Pedagogical Approaches to The Prairie. Getting students to “listen” to Cooper, and then to appreciate him.
Callahan, David (University of Aveiro, Portugal), Containing Manhood in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. For all its outdoor adventure, The Deerslayer is in many respects a novel raising issues of interior spaces and of femininity.
Flynn, Rebecca (University of Houston), Gendered Space and Judith Hunter in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. Complexities of gender roles on the frontier.
Goodier, Susan (SUNY Oneonta), Susan Fenimore Cooper and Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Views on the Political Life of Women.
Harding, J. Gregory (Northeastern University), “Without distinction of sex, rank, or color” : Cora Munro as Cooper’s Ideal and the Moral Center in The Last of the Mohicans. Cora Munro, though a woman, not quite genteel, and of partly African ancestry, occupies the center between “savagery” and “civility,” and represents Cooper’s ideal for a virtuous American.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), “I Loved Him Like a Brother”: Male Bonds in The Two Admirals. 2000 Central New York Conference on Language and Literature, Cortland, N.Y. Homosocial bonds between the two principal characters.
House, Kay Seymour (San Francisco State University), Cooper’s Females. Cooper reflects American literary conventions of his time, but sometimes pushes their limits.
Lampe, David (Buffalo State University), Gender on the Rocks: Cooper’s Jack Tier, or the Florida Reef. Treatment of gender, humerous and otherwise, in Jack Tier and in The Red Rover.
Lang, Christopher Thomas (Lehigh University), Gayle Rubin and Cooper’s Spy: War, Trauma, Rupture, and the “Traffic in Women”. A passive and an active heroine.
Owen, William (Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto), From Resistance to Autonomy: Daughter-Father Relationships in The Last of the Mohicans and The Pathfinder. Contest between the cultural values of the (military) fathers and the emerging values of the daughters.
Sabath, Keni (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Whimsical Women and Manly-Man Mohicans: Feminist Perspective on Women, Native People, and Nature in The Last of the Mohicans. In “choosing” Alice over Cora, Cooper reinforces an ideal for women of “timidity, passivity, and arguably, vapidity”.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), The Mature Marriage in Cooper’s Fiction. Cooper’s mature literary marriages — some successful (especially The Prairie, but also Wyandotté, The Heidenmauer, and The Crater); others ranging from unhelpful (Precaution) to destructive (Jack Tier); contrasted with Howells’ Rise of Silas Lapham.
Shillinglaw, Susan (San Jose State University), Cooper’s Fathers and Daughters: The Dialectic of Paternity. Cooper’s brave patriarchs nurture dutiful but independent and sensitive daughters.
Shillinglaw, Susan (San Jose State University), Pictorial Space as Identity in The Deerslayer. In seeking their identities, Deerslayer moves successfully outward towards a world of action; Judith unsuccessfully inward towards a world of self-understanding.
Sterling, Victoria (Lehman College/CUNY), Virtues and Failings: The Deerslayer, The Advocate, and the Discourse of Female Moral Reform. Cooper’s novel and The Advocate of Moral Reform consider female gender roles.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), “The Paradise of Women”: The Domestic Sphere in Notions of the Americans. Contradictory notions of separate spheres (for women, Indians, etc.) pervade both Notions and Cooper’s other writings.
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia), The Perils of Parenting: Parental Manipulation in The Leatherstocking Tales. That Cooper’s fathers assert a dominant family role, but at the same time endanger and manipulate their daughters, is an implicit critique of 19ᵗʰ century fatherhood.
Werlock, Abby H.P. (Hamilton College), Courageous Young Women in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales; Heroines and Victims. Cooper’s Leatherstocking heroines (Elizabeth Temple, Cora Munro, Ellen Wade, Mabel Dunham, Judith Hutter) are spirited, independent, and courageous.
Zeitvogel, Chuck (State University of New York College at Brockport), Gender Power and Social Class: The Role of Women in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder, Homeward Bound, Home as Found and The Ways of the Hour. In these works, “Female characters are only allowed to wield power in small, enclosed spaces, or in life or death situations. ... Male characters ... control all social space and political power.” Master of Arts Thesis, Brockport, November 2004.
Zhang, Aiping (California State University at Chico), The Negotiation of Masculinities: James Fenimore Cooper’s Ideology of Manhood in The Last of the Mohicans. By exploring different kinds of men, white and Indian, Cooper helps refine and define American notions of masculinity and identity.
Wegener, Signe O. (University of Georgia), A Brave New World: Wilderness Dreams and Female Empowerment from Vineland to the Pacific. Strong women, not just in Cooper, but in earlier international writings including: Freydis in the Icelandic Saga of Erick the Red (ca. 1000); Queen Calafia in Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, Las Sergas de Explandián (1510); Unca in Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseud.), The Female American (1767); and “The Lady” in Abraham Panther (pseud.), The Panther Captivity (1787).

History, Cooper as Historian

Adams, Charles H. (University of Virginia), “The Guardian of the Law”; George Washington’s Role in The Spy. Conflict in Cooper between law and higher principle, especially as seen in The Spy.
Axelrad, Allan M. (University of Pennsylvania), History and Utopia: A Study of the World View of James Fenimore Cooper. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1978. (x, 231 p.) © 1978 by Allan M. Axelrad, and placed online with his permission. A major and provocative study of Cooper’s intellectual and religious views, as reflected in a detailed study of his novels and other writings.
Baveystock, Freddy (Oxford University), Probable Fictions and Improbable Truths: The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, Notions of the Americans and Cooper’s Quarrel with History. Cooper’s views of the relationship between fiction and history, and of the nature of truth.
Bevilacqua, Winifred Farrant (Universita Degli Studi di Torino), Fictional Design and Historical Vision in The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper draws on literary tradition and ends with the victory of “civilization,” but also repeatedly undermines this triumphalism by suggesting other options and lost opportunities.
Birns, Nicholas New School University), The Unknown War: The Last of the Mohicans and the Effacement of the Seven Years War in American Historical Myth. Why Cooper did not make the Iroquois the heroes of this novel.
Buchholz, Douglas (University of Pennsylvania), Landownership and Representations of Social Conflict in The Pioneers. A Marxist reading of the novel, with Cooper as a proto-Marxist “socio-historical realist” employing “supreme ... socio-ideological acuity.”
de Fee, Nicole (University of Nebraska-Lincoln). The Post-Colonial Paradox of a Re-imagined History in Cooper’s The Pioneers. America has won its independence, but Americans have not yet established a resolved sense of identity.
Fanuzzi, Robert (St. Johns University), Empire of Tears. Cooper (and Catharine Maria Sedgwick) used a feminized historical novel to transform the Indian captivity tale into the sentimental novel.
Goldbæk, Henning (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), History and Mythology in The Prairie. Law of nature vs. law of civilization, and the Trapper’s (Natty’s) dream of reconciling them.
Hancuff, Richard (George Washington University), Without a Cross: Writing the Nation in The Last of the Mohicans. Racial/ethnic/national control over diversity in the novel echoes the creation of the American nation.
Goetzmann, William H. (University of Texas), James Fenimore Cooper : The Prairie. Hennig Cohen, ed., Landmarks of American Writing, New York: Basic Books, 1969, pp. 75-87. Analysis of novel, examining Cooper’s sources and arguing that the heart of the novel is the redemption of Ishmael Bush.
Hales, John (California State University at Fresno), American Millenialism and The Crater. Despite comparisons with Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, Cooper’s The Crater is theologically and historically optimistic.
Hecht, Roger (SUNY Oneonta): “Worse than trash”? Politics, Poetry, and the Anti-Rent Press. The popular press background to The Redskins
House, Kay S. (San Francisco State University), Cooper as Historian.The Pilot understood John Paul Jones better than Samuel Morison; The Last of the Mohicans depicts the Iroquois better than Colden, Parkman or Morgan.
Johnson, Rochelle (Albertson College of Idaho), James Fenimore Cooper, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and the Work of History. SFC’s uses of history and natural history both differ from those of her father, and revise the dominant myths of 19ᵗʰ century America.
Kelly, William P. (Queens College, City University of New York), History, Language, and The Leatherstocking Tales. Historiography of later Tales contrasted with that of earler ones, and with Scott’s Waverley novels.
Long, James (Louisiana State University). Constructing the Nation’s Memory: Excluded Historical Narratives in Cooper’s The Spy. Because America has established a history revolving around Washington, ambiguous figures like Harvey Birch must vanish from the collective memory.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Book that Made Glens Falls Famous: An Introduction to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Born in the Cave at Glens Falls in 1824, Mohicans considers seriously the role of the wilderness in creating the American character, the American Indian, and the African-American. (2000)
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), “Their Waste Has Done It All”: The Prairie as a Post-Apocalyptic Novel. Natty Bumppo’s vision of the prairies as a man-created desert in which human ruins have turned to dust, just as geological science was making such a chronology conceivable, casts new ecological light on this novel.
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Pioneers: Creator of a New York Frontier Image. What kind of frontier did the novel really portray?
Madison, Karen Lentz and Madison, R.D. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie: An Introduction and Annotations. Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 32, 2016. Extensive series of reference materials, and detailed notes, concerning Cooper’s The Prairie (1827).
Magee, Richard M. (Fordham University), Landscape of Loss, Landscape of Promise. Thomas Cole, history, and the Coopers: JFC’s landscapes (The Last of the Mohicans) look back with sorrow; SFC’s (Rural Hours) look forward with hope.
Mann, Barbara A. (University of Toledo), Whipped Like a Dog: Crossed Blood in The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s treatment of Cora Munro and Natty Bumppo reveals a deep understanding of the problems of mixed race — African-American and Native American — in colonial America.
Marshall, Ian (Pennsylvania State University, Altoona), Cooper’s “Course of Empire”: Mountains and the Rise and Fall of American Civilization in The Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, and The Pioneers. In The Crater Cooper borrowed Thomas Cole’s mountain image to symbolize God; in his earlier novels mountains symbolize America.
McWilliams, John (Middlebury College), Revolution and the Historical Novel : Cooper’s Transforming of European Tradition. The Spy and Lionel Lincoln reject the wavering European hero of Scott, Balzac, and Pushkin, but accept the notion of innate character.
Norwood, Lisa West (Drake University), Cooper’s Pacific: The Crater and Theories of History in the South Seas. The Crater deals with a variety of narratives, of America in the Pacific, of natural history, and of of human experiences of history, which differ from those in Melville’s Typee.
Pickering, James H. (Michigan State University), New York in the Revolution: Cooper’s Wyandotté. Cooper’s local historical sources for the novel, depicting the Revolution in central New York as a civil war.
Pikus, Michael J. (Niagara County Community College), James Fenimore Cooper’s New York: Crossing the Border From Fiction to History. In his final work, an introduction to a never-completed history, Cooper reflects both his dispondence with American civilization and his continued realism in accepting new interpretations of it.
Pikus, Michael (Niagara Community College), James Fenimore Cooper and the Establishment of the American Local Event. American culture and literature deriving from the specificity of Cooper’s vision of America.
Ravage, Jessie A. (Independent Scholar, Cooperstown), The Home Book of the Picturesque : Father and Daughter. In this 1852 anthology, JFC’s academic essay “American and European Scenery Compared” contrasts with SFC’s more personal and place-specific “A Dissolving View,” which prefigures realistic American regional sketches.
Redekop, Ernest H. (University of Western Ontario), Cooper’s Emblems of History. Using landscape to portray history in The Last of the Mohicans, Satanstoe, The Heidenmauer, and The Crater (in the last, Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire).
Salamon, Linda B. (Essex Community College), “A Life in the Woods”: Failure of Leadership in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The Pioneers, and The Crater. Religion and historical process in Cooper’s views of leadership.
Schramer, James J. (Youngstown State University), James Fenimore Cooper and the Myth of the Citizen Soldier/Sailor. Cooper and the ambiguous myth of the American citizen/soldier/patriot in The Spy and The Pilot.
Siewers, Alfred (Bucknell University), A Geography of the Imagination: James Fenimore and Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Regional Legacy. The Coopers and the concept of an Upper Susquehanna Region.
Suzuki, Erin M. (University of California, Los Angeles). Paradise Lost: James Fenimore Cooper and the Pursuit of Empire in the American Pacific. The fatal attraction of Empire in Cooper’s The Prairie and, especially, The Crater.
Walden, Dan (Baylor University), Cooper’s Coastscapes: The Significance of Setting in The Pilot. How Cooper uses the coastal setting of the novel to discuss the ambiguous realities of the Revolution and early Republic.
Watts, Edward (Michigan State University), Cooper, Richardson, and the Frontiers of Nationalism. Cooper’s nationalism both influenced and was modified in the Canadian nationalism of John Richardson’s Indian tales Wacousta (1832), and The Canadian Brothers (1840).
Whitehill, Walter Muir (Boston Athenaeum), Cooper as a Naval Historian. Importance of Cooper’s Naval History.
Williams, Kennedy Jr. (University of Kentucky), Cooper’s Use of American History. Especially in Lionel Lincoln and The Last of the Mohicans.

Indians and Frontier

Black, Christopher Allan (Auburn University), Benevolent Colonization or Subjugation of the Noble Savage? James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms Debate Indian Removal in the Literary Age of Jackson.
Harthorn, Steven P. (Williams Baptist College), “Plunder,” “Fixens,” and Bee Hunting: Cooper’s Manuscript Notes for The Prairie. Cooper’s brief notes inform both The Prairie and, perhaps, The Oak Openings.
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Pioneers: Creator of a New York Frontier Image . What kind of frontier did the novel really portray?
Madison, Robert D. (US Naval Academy), Wish-ton-Wish: Muck or Melancholy. Sources of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) and why Cooper called the whip-poor-will a wish-ton-wish, which is a plains Indian name for prairie dog.
Mann, Barbara A. (University of Toledo), Whipped Like a Dog: Crossed Blood in The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s treatment of Cora Munro and Natty Bumppo reveals a deep understanding of the problems of mixed race — African-American and Native American — in colonial America.
Mann, Barbara (University of Toledo), The Other Matter at Detroit: John Heckewelder, Revolutionary Spy. Cooper’s informant on Indian culture, the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, provided General Washington with military intelligence.
Mann, Barbara (University of Toledo), Man with a Cross: Hawkeye was a “Half Breed”. Cooper intended Natty Bumppo as being of mixed European/Indian race.
Mann. Barbara Alice (University of Toledo), Spirits of Sky, Spirits of Earth: the Spirituality of Chingachgook. Native American dualistic cosmology, rarely noted by Euro-Americans, reflected in Chingachgook’s behavior in The Pioneers.
Michaelsen, Scott (University of Texas, El Paso), The Color Line, Beavers and the Destructuring of White Identity in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Complexities of color between “black” beavers and bears, “white” Europeans, and “red” Indians.
Murray, Keat (Lehigh University). Indians and Dissembling Gentlemen in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers. The real John Heckewelder is not the idealist figure of Cooper’s fancy, and Cooper’s Pioneers is is not a classless society.
Nesmith, Christopher (University of South Carolina-Columbia). Settling Down: Staging Masculinity in Cooper’s PioneersThe Pioneers and the progression of settlement.
Parker, Arthur C. (Past President, New York State Historical Association), Sources and Range of Cooper’s Indian Lore. Cooper relied on written sources like John Heckewelder, rather than studying living Indians near Cooperstown.
Peprnik, Michal (Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic), Moravian Origins of J. F. Cooper’s Indians. Cooper’s Indians are based on the works of Moravian Missionary John Heckewelder.
Phillips, Anne K. (Kansas State University), James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Descendants: American History for 21ˢᵗ Century Adolescent Readers. Discussion of Gary Paulson’s Woods Runner (2010); Susan Cooper’s Ghost Hawk (2013); and Helen Frost’s SALT (2013)
Pikus, Michael J. (Niagara County Community College), The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin and James Fenimore Cooper’s Continuing Historical Paradox. The 1846 novel expresses Cooper’s disgust at the Jacksonian America to which he has returned — both for its expulsion of Native Americans and its political destruction of a liberal landed gentry.
Pilote, Pauline (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon), “A Region fruitful of wonders and adventures”: Romancing the West in Cooper’s and Irving’s Narratives. Contrasting Cooper’s treatment of the frontier, mostly from the Leatherstocking Tales with Irving’s A Tour of the Prairies, Astoria, and “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.
Ramos, Peter (Buffalo State University), (Never) True Romance: The Function of History and the Imagination in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper deliberately uses the romance form to present an ideal of inter-racial mixture, but concludes by deeming it historically impossible.
Sawaya, Francesa (Cornell University), Between Revolution and Racism: Colonialism and the American Indian in The Prairie. Cooper’s Indians reflect colonialism and the “sentimentalized racism” of his day.
Schwartz, Rebecca Ayres (University of Delaware). Historicism and Nostalgia in Thomas Cole’s Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Thomas Cole’s four paintings based on it use nostalgia to create a sense of national identity.
Sivils, Matthew Wynn (Oklahoma State University), Bears, Culture-Crossing, and the Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper’s use of bears as symbols to discuss cross-cultural and cross-racial transitions.
Sivils, Matthew Wynn (Iowa State University), When Peter Parley Met Natty Bumppo: Samuel Goodrich, James Fenimore Cooper, and the Invention of a Young Adult Frontier. Samuel Goodrich (1793-1860) writes his Peter Parley’s Story of Little Marion (1830) as a sort of juvenile Pioneers.
Starna, William A. (SUNY Oneonta), Cooper’s Indians: A Critique. Ethnohistorical background to the New York Indians of the Leatherstocking Tales.
Stauffer, John (Harvard University), Interracial Friendships in The Deerslayer. In creating the Natty Bumppo/Chingachgook and similar interracial relationships, Cooper sought to fulfill the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, in imagination if not in reality, and exerted an enormous influence on American literature.
Suzuki, Taisuke (Asahi University, Japan), The True Beginning of Native American Novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Helen Hunt Jackson. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and Jackson’s Ramona (1884) as pioneering novels treating Native Americans seriously.
Taylor, Alan (University of California at Davis), The Great Change Begins: Settling the Forest of Central New York The real lives of the first settlers of Otsego County (prototypes of Cooper’s The Pioneers); economic, social, and environmental.
Varkan, Anna (Moscow City Teacher Training University), Debunking the Myth of the “Promised Land” in the Leather-Stocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. They portray the degeneration of the Puritan ideal of the “Promised Land,” both as to white material values and the gradual destruction of Native Americans.
Wallace, David Shane (American University in Bulgaria). Copway’s Homage to Cooper: Redefining the ‘Vanishing American,’. George Copway (1818-1869), a traveled and literary Ojibwa Indian, honors the elderly Cooper.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), “The Paradise of Women”: The Domestic Sphere in Notions of the Americans. Contradictory notions of separate spheres (for women, Indians, etc.) pervade both Notions and Cooper’s other writings.
Wallace, Paul A.W. (Editor, Pennsylvania History), Cooper’s Indians. Delawares and Iroquois (“Mingos”) in the Leatherstocking Tales based on Heckewelder; legend of Delaware as “women” explored.
Watts, Edward (Michigan State University), Cooper, Richardson, and the Frontiers of Nationalism. Cooper’s nationalism both influenced and was modified in the Canadian nationalism of John Richardson’s Indian tales Wacousta (1832), and The Canadian Brothers (1840).
Zhang, Aiping (California State University at Chico), Can the Twain Meet through Acculturation? The Cultural Hybrids in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper often portrays acculturation of Native Americans (such as The Pioneers’ John Mohegan), but concludes that real acculturation between Indian and white is not possible.

Landscape and its Aesthetics

Axelrad, Allan M. (California State University at Fullerton), Epiphany at Ischia: The Effect of Italy on James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Landscape Painting. How Cooper fell in love with Italian scenery, learned to tell picturesque from sublime, and feared the wilderness.
Axelrad, Allan M. (California State University, Fullerton), From Mountain Gothic to Forest Gothic and Luminism: Changing Representations of the Landscape in the Leatherstocking Tales and in American Painting. How Cooper’s views of landscape changed, both when he returned from Europe and later.
Beard, James F., Jr. (Dartmouth College), Cooper and his Artistic Contemporaries Close ties, personal and in vision, between Cooper and his artistic contemporaries, notably Cole, Dunlap, Greenough, and Morse.
Bailey, Brigitte (University of New Hampshire), The Panoptic Sublime and the Formation of the American Citizen in Cooper’s Wing-and-Wing and Cole’s Mount Etna from Taormina, Sicily. Novel and the painting both make use of a panoramic view, reflecting parallel changes in their creators’ outlooks in the 1840s.
Begg, Leah A. (University of Connecticut), “I See Nothing but Land and Water; and a Lovely Scene It Is”: Nature’s Enchantment in The Last of the Mohicans.
Crawford, James (Curator, Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery), James Fenimore Cooper and the Art of the Erie Canal. New York landscape art influenced by Cooper’s Notions of the Americans and The Last of the Mohicans.
D’Ambrosio, Paul S. (New York State Historical Association), Light Upon the Glimmerglass: Cooper and the American Landscape Painters of Otsego Lake. The Otsego of The Pioneers, Home as Found, and The Deerslayer contrasted with that of 19ᵗʰ century landscape painters.
Denne, Constance Ayers (Baruch College, City University of New York), Cooper’s Use of Setting in the European Trilogy. Settings in The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, and The Headsman as artistic keys to Cooper’s meaning.
Donahue, James (University of Connecticut), Representing Cooper’s Landscape: The N.C. Wyeth Illustrations. The significance of N.C. Wyeth’s well-known illustrations of The Last of the Mohicans.
Franklin, Wayne (University of Connecticut), The Prairie, Space, and Aesthetic Pleasure.
Foulon, Jacqueline (University of Paris), Landscape as Referential Paradox in The Last of the Mohicans. The use of landscape to create a fictional past.
Iglesias, Luis A. (University of Southern Mississippi), Cooper, Cole and the Melancholy Sublime.
Peck, H. Daniel (University of California at Santa Barbara), Place into Space: from The Pioneers to The Deerslayer. Otsego Lake as the center of Cooper’s imagination.
Ramos, Peter (Buffalo State University), Nature’s “harshest but truest colors”; Romantic and Un-Romantic Nature in The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Both Cooper and Mark Twain uneasily offer “a particular view of nature, as sublime cure for the ills of civilization or else a mirror of man’s violence.”
Ravage, Jessie A. (Independent Scholar, Cooperstown), The Home Book of the Picturesque : Father and Daughter. In this 1852 anthology, JFC’s academic essay “American and European Scenery Compared” contrasts with SFC’s more personal and place-specific “A Dissolving View,” which prefigures realistic American regional sketches.
Redekop, Ernest H. (University of Western Ontario), Cooper’s Emblems of History. Using landscape to portray history in The Last of the Mohicans, Satanstoe, The Heidenmauer, and The Crater (in the last, Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire).
Schramer, James J. (Youngstown State University), “A Union of Art and Nature”: Cooper and American Landscape Aesthetics. The Coopers (James and Susan), landscape, and gardens.
Schramer, James J. (Youngstown State University), Gleanings of a Harvest Already Gathered: Recollection & Response in Cooper’s European Landscapes. Especially as reflected in
Schwartz, Rebecca Ayers (University of Delaware). Historicism and Nostalgia in Thomas Cole’s Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Thomas Cole’s four paintings based on it use nostalgia to create a sense of national identity.
Shour, Nancy C. (Independent Scholar), Heirs to the Wild and Distant Past: Landscape and Historiography in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers. Cooper’s landscapes record a past to be preserved for coming generations.
Siewers, Alfred (Bucknell University), A Geography of the Imagination: James Fenimore and Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Regional Legacy. The Coopers and the concept of an Upper Susquehanna Region.

Language & Rhetoric

Ashley, Leonard R.N. (Brooklyn College, City University of New York), The Onomastics of Cooper’s Verbal Art in The Deerslayer and Elsewhere. Conscious artistry in Cooper’s use of names compensates for his other literary faults.
Clarke, Colin A. (George Washington University), Like a Mirror Reflecting Itself: Natty Bumppo, The Virginian, and the Fate of the American Frontier. The Last of the Mohicans prefigures the American “Western novel,” but its multiplicity of voices (heteroglossia) distinguishes it from Owen Wister’s classic “Western.”
Egan, Hugh (Ithaca College) Cooper’s Career in the First Person. Cooper’s “first person” writings, beginning with the biographical Ned Myers and continuting through The Redskins, in which — contrary to accepted wisdom — Hugh Littlepage’s rantings may not reflect the author’s views on the rent controversy.
Engell, John (San Jose State University), Reading and Hearing Natty Bumppo’s Last Word in The Prairie. Musings on the possible meanings of the illiterate Natty’s dying word: “here” — or is it “hear”?
Ganter, Granville (City University of New York), Battles of Rhetoric: Oratory and Identity in Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. Use of “Indian rhetoric” by Cooper, and by Indians themselves.
Ganter, Granville (City University of New York Graduate Center), Voices of Instruction: Oratory and Discipline in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and The Redskins. Complexities in Cooper’s use of “Indian oratory,” and in his sources of information.
Garcia, John J. (California State University, Northridge), A Matter of “Improvements”; Cooper, Race, and Manuscript Alterations in the Transatlantic Revision of The Spy. Changes Cooper made in the 1831 British edition, notably concerning the Black character Caesar Thompson.
Harthorn, Steven P. (Williams Baptist College), “Plunder,” “Fixens,” and Bee Hunting: Cooper’s Manuscript Notes for The Prairie. Cooper’s brief notes inform both The Prairie and, perhaps, The Oak Openings.
Kalter, Susan (University of California at San Diego), The Last of the Mohicans as Contemporary Theory: James Fenimore Cooper’s Philosophy of Language. Cooper assumes a linguistic hierarchy reflecting mental and political power.
Madison, Karen Lentz and Madison, R.D. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie: An Introduction and Annotations. Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 32, 2016. Extensive series of reference materials, and detailed notes, concerning Cooper’s The Prairie (1827).
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Wish-ton-Wish: Muck or Melancholy. Sources of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) and why Cooper called the whip-poor-will a wish-ton-wish, which is a plains Indian name for prairie dog.
Mate, Laurence (University of Chicago), How Rhetoric Figures in Cooper’s Fiction; Or, Epitaph Upon Epitaph. As exemplified in The Chainbearer and other novels, Cooper uses rhetoric in complex ways that are important in understanding his meaning.
Mazel, David (Louisiana State University), Shooting as Performative Speech in The Last of the Mohicans. The “speech” of Hawkeye’s gun likened to the Spanish Requeirimiento placing American Indians under the Spanish crown.
Morton, Richard (McMaster University), Perception and Reality: The Novelist, the Deerslayer and the ReaderDeerslayer deals with surface appearances and hidden realities.
Ringe, Donald A. (University of Kentucky), Cooper’s Mode of Expression. Cooper’s complex descriptive genius, exemplified in Lionel Lincoln, Wyandotté and especially The Pioneers.
Sayre, Jillian (Wayne State University). A Cuisine of Contre Te(r)ms: Consumption, Community and Intralinguistic Struggle in The Prairie. When is a buffalo a bison? — complexities of language in the novel.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper, Style and The Bravo. Cooper’s writing style and its sources; studies of Cooper’s style; and (in great detail) an examination of his writing style in The Bravo. [Keynote Address]
Scannavini, Anna (Università dell’Aquila). Typographies of Writing in The Bravo. Cooper’s understanding and use of pre-unification Italian dialects, including that of Venice, in the novel.
Starobin, Christina (Saugerties, New York), Who Owns the Land and Who Cares for It. Metaphors of birds and beasts in The Prairie
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia). What’s in an Accent? Cooper’s “Vanishing Scotsmen” in the Leather-Stocking Tales. Cooper’s minimal but changing use of the Scottish accent, as ethnic and class indicator.
Walker, Warren S. (Blackburn College), Elements of Folk Culture in Cooper’s Novels. Cooper’s extensive use of American folklore, proverbs, and dialect.
Walker, Warren S. (Texas Tech University), Cooper’s Fictional Use of the Oral Tradition. Cooper’s use of folk speech, folk types, and folk-lore, with a detailed, annotated bibliography.

New York History and Culture

Alpern, Will J. (Prudential-Bache Securities), Indians, Sources, Critics. Cooper’s sources, especially Moravian missionaries to the Mohegan/Mohicans of Connecticut/New York; efforts to discredit Cooper by Louis Cass and Mark Twain.
Axelrad, Allan (California State University, Fullerton), Christmas in Cooperstown and Templeton: The Coopers and the Invention of an American Holiday Tradition. How both James and Susan Fenimore Cooper, in The Pioneers and Rural Hours, commented on and contributed to creating American Christmas traditions (keynote address).
Bender, Thomas (University of California, Davis), James Fenimore Cooper and the City. Abandoning his reliance on the rural gentleman as the backbone of society, Cooper, contrary to accepted interpretations, began by mid-century to look to the new urban commercial elite.
Butterfield, L[yman] H. (Princeton University), Judge William Cooper (1754-1809): A Sketch of His Character and Accomplishment. The first scholarly study of the life of James Fenimore Cooper’s father.
Butterfield, Lyman H. (Institute of Early American History and Culture), Cooper’s Inheritance: The Otsego Country and its Founders William Cooper and the early history of Otsego County.
Carso, Kerry Dean (Oneonta, New York), The Old Dwelling Transmogrified: James Fenimore Cooper’s Otsego Hall. James Fenimore Cooper’s remodelling of Otsego Hall, creating the second Gothic mansion in America.
Crawford, James (Curator, Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery), James Fenimore Cooper and the Art of the Erie Canal. New York landscape art influenced by Cooper’s Notions of the Americans and The Last of the Mohicans.
Cooper, James Fenimore (grandson of author), William Cooper and Andrew Craig’s Purchase of Croghan’s Land. Rebuttal of Volwiler’s 1923 allegations concerning William Cooper’s 1786 acquisition of part of the “Croghan Patent”.
D’Ambrosio, Paul S. (New York State Historical Association), Light Upon the Glimmerglass: Cooper and the American Landscape Painters of Otsego Lake. The Otsego of The Pioneers, Home as Found, and The Deerslayer contrasted with that of 19ᵗʰ century landscape painters.
Dunn, James Taylor (Librarian, New York State Historical Association), Troskolaski and Cooper. When a Polish refugee landed on Cooper’s doorstep in 1834, helping him proved not so easy.
Ellis, David Maldwyn (Hamilton College), The Coopers and the New York State Landholding Systems. Cooper, property, and the “anti-rent wars”; the Littlepage novels (Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins).
Ellsworth, Waldo (First National Bank of Cooperstown), Cooperstown’s First Bank. History of the Otsego County Bank, 1830-1866, one of whose principal depositors (and check writers) was James Fenimore Cooper.
Franklin, Wayne (Northeastern University), Cooper and New York’s Dutch Heritage. Cooper’s exceptional understanding of New York Dutch rural building practices.
Holden, James Austin (State Historian of New York), The Lineage of Colonel George Monro. The real-life career and ancestry of Col. Munro (George Monro) of Fort William Henry, as provided by Scottish lawyer John A. Inglis.
Holden, James Austin (University of the State of New York), The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s Historical Inventions, and his Cave. After criticizing and investigating Cooper’s “errors” in anachronistic use of the name “Glenn’s”, renaming Lake George as “the Horican”, and giving Col. Munro his daughters Cora and Alice, Mr. Holden (a retired State Historian of New York) explores the history of Glens Falls and its caves (with many early descriptions), the true story of Lt. Col. George Monro of Fort William Henry [continued from a 1914 article], and the bridges spanning the cave-covered island.
Larkin, F. Daniel (SUNY Oneonta), Cooper Country.Local historical background to Cooper’s life and work.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Cooperstown’s Cooper. How Cooperstown influenced Cooper, and was reflected in his works.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Pioneers as History. A detailed outline of The Pioneers with extensive notes and questions focused on the novel’s depiction of early Cooperstown and early America. (1994)
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Making a Place Historic: The Coopers and Cooperstown. How three generations of Coopers gave their differing visions of Cooperstown to the world. (1998)
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Pioneers: Creator of a New York Frontier Image. What kind of frontier did the novel really portray?
Pikus, Michael J. (Niagara County Community College), James Fenimore Cooper’s New York: Crossing the Border From Fiction to History. In his final work, an introduction to a never-completed history, Cooper reflects both his dispondence with American civilization and his continued realism in accepting new interpretations of it.
Parker, Arthur C. (Past President, New York State Historical Association), Sources and Range of Cooper’s Indian Lore. Cooper relied on written sources like John Heckewelder, rather than studying living Indians near Cooperstown.
Pickering, James H. (Michigan State University), New York in the Revolution: Cooper’s Wyandotté. Cooper’s local historical sources for the novel, depicting the Revolution in central New York as a civil war.
Pickering, James A. (Michigan State University), Cooper’s Otsego Heritage: The Sources of The Pioneers. Sources in Cooperstown local history.
Siewers, Alfred (Bucknell University), A Geography of the Imagination: James Fenimore and Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Regional Legacy. The Coopers and the concept of an Upper Susquehanna Region.
Starna, William A. (SUNY Oneonta), Cooper’s Indians: A Critique. Ethnohistorical background to the New York Indians of the Leatherstocking Tales.
Taylor, Alan (Boston University), Who Murdered William Cooper? The family tradition of William Cooper’s murder, accepted by generations of biographers and critics, is without foundation; William Cooper died a peaceful and natural death.
Taylor, Alan (University of California at Davis), The Great Change Begins: Settling the Forest of Central New York The real lives of the first settlers of Otsego County (prototypes of Cooper’s The Pioneers); economic, social, and environmental.
Volwiler, A[lbert] T. (Ph. D.), George Croghan and the Development of Central New York, 1763-1800. The efforts of George Croghan, Indian agent and land speculator, to establish a settlement centered on Lake Otsego, and of William Cooper’s eventual acquisition of much of the “Croghan Patent”.
Walker, Warren S. (Blackburn College), Elements of Folk Culture in Cooper’s Novels. Cooper’s extensive use of American folklore, proverbs, and dialect.
Walker, Warren S. (Texas Tech University), Cooper’s Yorkers and Yankees in the Jeffersonian Garden. A Jeffersonian agrarian democrat confronts the commercial Yankee invasion of New York.
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia), Enjoying the Bounties of Nature: Food in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper and Food — especially in The Pioneers and The Pathfinder.

Political Views and Philosophy

Adams, Charles H. (University of Virginia), “The Guardian of the Law”; George Washington’s Role in The Spy. Conflict in Cooper between law and higher principle, especially as seen in The Spy.
Axelrad, Allan M. (University of Pennsylvania), History and Utopia: A Study of the World View of James Fenimore Cooper. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1978. (x, 231 p.) © 1978 by Allan M. Axelrad, and placed online with his permission. A major and provocative study of Cooper’s intellectual and religious views, as reflected in a detailed study of his novels and other writings.
Axelrad, Allan M. (California State University at Fullerton), “Aristocracy forsooth! ... the blackguard is the aristocrat” : James Fenimore Cooper on Congress and Capitalism. His reputation to the contrary, Cooper detested “aristocracy,” which he associated with rising American capitalism.
Axelrad, Allan M. (California State University at Fullerton), Cooper, Aristocracy, and Capitalism. Cooper not only despised “aristocracy”, but saw it in the growing commercial/political oligarchy of American capitalism.
Bender, Thomas (University of California, Davis), James Fenimore Cooper and the City. Abandoning his reliance on the rural gentleman as the backbone of society, Cooper, contrary to accepted interpretations, began by mid-century to look to the new urban commercial elite.
Berger, Jason (University of South Dakota). The Crater and the Master’s Reign: Cooper’s “Floating Imperium”. Jacques Lacan’s “master-signifier” as a tool for examining the political thought in the novel.
Buchholz, Douglas (University of Pennsylvania), Landownership and Representations of Social Conflict in The Pioneers. A Marxist reading of the novel, with Cooper as a proto-Marxist “socio-historical realist” employing “supreme ... socio-ideological acuity.”
Christophersen, Bill (Independent Scholar), The “Amaranthine Flower” of Virtue: Cooper’s Pathfinder as Democratic Trail-Blazer.
Clohessy, Ronald John (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). Ship of State: American Identity and Maritime Nationalism in the Sea Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. A survey of Cooper’s changing views on America as reflected in his sea novels from The Pilot to The Sea Lions.
Fiedler, Leslie A. (SUNY Buffalo), James Fenimore Cooper: The Problem of the Good Bad Writer. Cooper’s “schlock” reveals American culture’s racist, sexist, imperialist, and genocidal underside.
Gentry, April D. (Savannah State University), Created Space: The Crater and the Pacific Frontier. The novel as a cautionary warning about American expansion in the Pacific, with especial reference to Hawaii.
Gladsky, Thomas S. (Central Missouri State University), Cooper’s Other Americans: Cultural Diversity and American Homogeneity. Cooper shared many of the Nativist, anti-foreigner, views of his time.
Grossman, James (Lawyer and biographer), Cooper and the Responsibility of the Press. American freedom threatened by public opinion and an unscrupulous press; Cooper’s libel suits, Home as Found, and The American Democrat.
Goodier, Susan (SUNY Oneonta), Susan Fenimore Cooper and Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Views on the Political Life of Women.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), The Tortured Profession of Authorship: Novelist Again. Chapter 1 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s controversial re-entry into the realm of fiction-writing with Homeward Bound and Home as Found after his supposed “retirement” in 1834; his exploration of the ethics of authorship in his 1838 Knickerbocker Magazine critique of Sir Walter Scott.
Lenz, Bradley A. (Independent Scholar), James Fenimore Cooper’s Polish Cause.
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Bravo: Cooper’s Message to America. The totalitarian Venetian aristocracy exposed as a warning against economic corporate aristocracy in America.
Michaelsen, Scott (SUNY Buffalo), Cooper’s Monikins: Contracts, Construction, and Chaos. Cooper’s views of Constitutional (and contract) interpretation are at the heart of The Monikins.
Murray, Keat (California University of Pennsylvania), Political Prattle in James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Favorite Book’: Reciprocal Readings of the A.B.C. Letters and The Monikins. The significance of The Monikins is increased when it is compared with the Cooper’s so-called “A.B.C. Letters” and placed in the context of contemporary American politics.
Okada, Ryoichi (Niigata University, Japan), Irreconcilable Conflicts in The Pioneers.Chiba Review, No. 10 (1988), pp. 1-18. There can be no reconciliation between Natty Bumppo’s “redskin” culture of nature and truth, and Judge Temple’s “paleface” culture of artificiality and falsehood. A Japanese view.
Olson, Nels E. (Michigan State University), Democracy as Failure and Refusal in Lionel Lincoln; or, the Leaguer of Boston. How Cooper uses literature (i.e., writing) to challenge established legal orders.
Owen, William (Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto), Cooper’s Speculations on a New Moral America in the Novels of the 1840s. Cooper’s adoption of the “Scottish” Common Sense philosophy facilitated his abandonment, in the later novels, of political for familial and religious solutions to national moral dilemmas.
Owen, William (Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto), Natty Changes His Will: Legacies and Beneficiaries in The Deerslayer and The Prairie. Why Natty leaves his possessions to Hard-Heart in The Prairie, but retroactively makes Chingachgook’s bride his heir in The Deerslayer.
Pikus, Michael J. (Niagara County Community College), James Fenimore Cooper’s New York: Crossing the Border From Fiction to History. In his final work, an introduction to a never-completed history, Cooper reflects both his dispondence with American civilization and his continued realism in accepting new interpretations of it.
Ringe, Donald A. (University of Kentucky), The Bravo : Social Criticism in the Gothic Mode. Brilliant use of Gothic literary style to depict a Republic reduced to totalitarian terr commercial greed; 18ᵗʰ century Venice in history; America (??) in the future.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper’s Attitude toward England. Cooper’s complex reactions, reflected in Notions of the Americans, Gleanings in Europe: England, and, much more ambiguously, in his fiction.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute). The ‘soulless corporation’ in Venice, England, France, and America: Cooper’s The Bravo (1831). Government’s tendency, in England, France, and perhaps America, to become a “soulless” aristocracy devoted to its own interests.
Schachterle, Lance, (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper, the Federalists, and the Aristocrats,. Cooper’s private correspondence about Federalists and their Whig descendants, and about aristocrats, shows that he is strongly critical of both groups.
Spiller, Robert E., (University of Pennsylvania), Second Thoughts on Cooper as a Social Critic. Detailed retrospective review of Cooper scholarship from Spiller’s own 1931 treatise to 1951.
Walker, Warren S. (Texas Tech University), Cooper’s Yorkers and Yankees in the Jeffersonian Garden. A Jeffersonian agrarian democrat confronts the commercial Yankee invasion of New York.

Race and African-Americans

MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Cooper’s The Headsman: What Have Swiss Executioners Got to Do with African-Americans? Is Cooper’s The Headsman (1831), set in 18ᵗʰ century Switzerland, really a critique of slavery and the treatments of African-Americans at home?
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Cooper, Slavery, and the Spirit of the Fair. Cooper expressed essentially racist and pro-slavery views in Notions of the Americans, The Chainbearer, and the posthumously published “New York.”
Mann, Barbara A. (University of Toledo), Whipped Like a Dog: Crossed Blood in The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s treatment of Cora Munro and Natty Bumppo reveals a deep understanding of the problems of mixed race — African-American and Native American — in colonial America.
Michaelsen, Scott (University of Texas, El Paso, The Color Line, Beavers and the Destructuring of White Identity in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Complexities of color between “black” beavers and bears, “white” Europeans, and “red” Indians.
Morsellino, John (Niagara Community College), Re-Drawing Cooper’s Color Line: Interracial Marriage in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. Cooper’s final word on White/Indian racial mixture.
Permaul, Nadesan (University of California, Berkeley). James Fenimore Cooper and the American National Myth. Cooper as designer of an essentially racist American myth, as expresed in The Pioneers.
Ramos, Peter (Buffalo State University), (Never) True Romance: The Function of History and the Imagination in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper deliberately uses the romance form to present an ideal of inter-racial mixture, but concludes by deeming it historically impossible.
Rumbinas, Barbara (Jagiellonian University), The Faces of Racism in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. Cooper “is not only concerned with interracial marriage, but also with the hypocrisy of the Puritan claim to racial and religious superiority”.
Rumbinas, Barbara and Zygmunt Mazur (Jagiellonian University), Born on Land, Shaped by the Sea: Character Development in James Fenimore Cooper’s Afloat and Ashore. How the virtuous character of the African-American slave “Neb” is developed in the twin novels Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingford.
Tawil, Ezra F. (Brown University), Romancing History: The Pioneers and the Problem of Slavery. By using the Indian/settler issue, Cooper was able to engage indirectly the taboo subject (in ante-bellum America) of slavery, opening the road to a national debate.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), Cooper and Slavery. Complexity of Cooper’s anti-slavery views, as shown in Satanstoe.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), Race and Spiritualism in Satanstoe. A partially cancelled authorial footnote about an African-American psychic medium in Cooperstown illustrates the cultural tensions surrounding the representation of race in the novel.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), The Black Sailor and The Red Rover. The comparatively favored status of African-American sailors in the early Republic allowed Cooper to explore racial diversity.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), Cooper on Corporal Punishment. Flogging, whether at sea or of a slave, is morally corrupting to the flogger.

Reception and Scholarship

Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), The Tortured Profession of Authorship: Novelist Again. Chapter 1 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s controversial re-entry into the realm of fiction-writing with Homeward Bound and Home as Found after his supposed “retirement” in 1834; his exploration of the ethics of authorship in his 1838 Knickerbocker Magazine critique of Sir Walter Scott.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Periodical Publication: Cooper and Graham’s Magazine. Chapter 4 of James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838-1851. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. Cooper’s experiments with magazine writing and his experiences in publishing his “Sketches of Naval Men” (Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers), Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, and Islets of the Gulf (Jack Tier).
Wegener, Signe O. (University of Georgia), Not Really the Last Mohican: Chingachgook and East Germany’s Indian Movement . Why it was Communist East Germany that made the most recent (and perhaps best) film version of The Deerslayer.
Zhang, Aiping (California State University at Chico), James Fenimore Cooper: A Rediscovered American Writer in China. China’s recent “Westward Rush” has sparked a new interest, popular and scholarly, in Cooper.

Religion and Morality

Adams, Charles H. (University of Virginia), “The Guardian of the Law”; George Washington’s Role in The Spy. Conflict in Cooper between law and higher principle, especially as seen in The Spy.
Axelrad, Allan M. (University of Pennsylvania), History and Utopia: A Study of the World View of James Fenimore Cooper. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1978. (x, 231 p.) © 1978 by Allan M. Axelrad, and placed online with his permission. A major and provocative study of Cooper’s intellectual and religious views, as reflected in a detailed study of his novels and other writings.
Carleton, Chris (Universiti Sain Malaysia, Penang), Justice and Moral Courage in The Spy. Cooper’s concern is moral rather than social, in contrast to British novels by Godwin, Bulwer-Lytton, and Dickens.
Daly, Robert (SUNY Buffalo), Cooper’s Creole: Literature and Ethics in America. (Keynote Address) Multiculturalism and virtue ethics, especially in The Last of the Mohicans.
Hales, John (California State University at Fresno), American Millenialism and The Crater. Despite comparisons with Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, Cooper’s The Crater is theologically and historically optimistic.
Harding, J. Gregory (Northeastern University), “Without distinction of sex, rank, or color” : Cora Munro as Cooper’s Ideal and the Moral Center in The Last of the Mohicans. Cora Munro, though a woman, not quite genteel, and of partly African ancestry, occupies the center between “savagery” and “civility,” and represents Cooper’s ideal for a virtuous American.
Harthorn, Edward (Williams Baptist College), Hollowed and Hallowed Trust within James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater. Conflict between divine trust and failed human trust leads to the failure of the colony.
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), “Few Get as Far South as I Have Been”: Stimson in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Sea Lions. The annoyingly pious Stimson is essential to Cooper’s religious message.
Kandl, John (New York University), Natty and the Judge: The Pictorial Development of An Ambivalent Theme in The Pioneers. Four scenes from the novel illustrate the irreconcilable conflict between the values of Natty and of Templeton.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Examining Man’s “Latent Sympathies” in The Heidenmauer. A morality tale about the frailties of men who are neither all good nor all bad.
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Peeling the Onion: Looking for Layers of Meaning in The Deerslayer. Nine layers of meaning, from juvenile to profound, in The Deerslayer.
Madison, Robert D. (University of Arkansas), Oak Openings: A Christian Novel. Of Cooper’s works, uniquely based on “conversion through the witness of martyrdom”; comparisons with The Sea Lions, The Wing-and-Wing, and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish.
Madison, R. D. (University of Arkansas), Faith on Ice: The Failure of Cooper’s Sea Lions. Cooper’s religious views in The Sea Lions contrasted with those in his “The Wing-And-Wing” and “The Oak Openings”.
Mann, Barbara Alice (University of Toledo), James Fenimore Cooper and God. Spiritual but critical of organized sects, as demonstrated in The Redskins, The Wing-and-Wing, The Crater, and The Deerslayer.
Marshall, Ian (Pennsylvania State University, Altoona), Cooper’s “Course of Empire”: Mountains and the Rise and Fall of American Civilization in The Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, and The Pioneers. In The Crater Cooper borrowed Thomas Cole’s mountain image to symbolize God; in his earlier novels mountains symbolize America.
Mani, Lakshmi (Rochester Institute of Technology), James Fenimore Cooper and the Apocalpyse. End-of-the world motifs in the Leatherstocking Tales and The Crater
Okada, Ryoichi (Niigata University, Japan), Irreconcilable Conflicts in The Pioneers.Chiba Review, No. 10 (1988), pp. 1-18. There can be no reconciliation between Natty Bumppo’s “redskin” culture of nature and truth, and Judge Temple’s “paleface” culture of artificiality and falsehood. A Japanese view.
Owen, William (Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto), Cooper’s Speculations on a New Moral America in the Novels of the 1840s. Cooper’s adoption of the “Scottish” Common Sense philosophy facilitated his abandonment, in the later novels, of political for familial and religious solutions to national moral dilemmas.
Owen, William (Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto), Natty Changes His Will: Legacies and Beneficiaries in The Deerslayer and The Prairie. Why Natty leaves his possessions to Hard-Heart in The Prairie, but retroactively makes Chingachgook’s bride his heir in The Deerslayer.
Peprnik, Michal (Palacký University, Olomouc). How Much “Moravian” is Natty Bumppo?. His relationship to the Moravian Church in which he was reared increases from The Pioneers, through The Prairie, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
Phinit-Akson, Helen [Dr. Helen James] (Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand), Ritual and Aesthetics: The Influence of Europe on the Art of Fenimore Cooper. Bangkok: Thammasat University Press, 1976. 114 p. Placed online with permission of the author. Detailed and sympathetic exploration of Cooper’s profound and orthodox Christian religious beliefs, centered on faith and redemption, as expounded in eight novels: The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, The Headsman, The Wing-and-Wing, Mercedes of Castile, The Oak Openings,, and The Sea Lions.
Ringe, Donald A. (University of Kentucky), Cooper Today: A Partisan View. Critical survey of Cooper criticism up to 1989, and call for examination of the religious and moral vision central to his work as a whole.
Roberson, Henry P. (Oklahoma State University), James Fenimore Cooper and Catholicism. How Cooper found a powerful spirituality in the Catholicism he observed in Europe, which surprised, intrigued, and may have changed him.
Salamon, Linda B. (Essex Community College), “A Life in the Woods”: Failure of Leadership in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The Pioneers, and The Crater. Religion and historical process in Cooper’s views of leadership.
Von Mehren, Ann (Arcadia University/University of Houston, James Fenimore Cooper and the Americanization of the Bible: A Rhetorical Analysis of the American Bible Society Founding Address of May 1816. How the Bible was “Americanized” at meeting Cooper attended.
Wolfe, Steven (University of Houston), The Path to a New Environmental Consciousness in The Deerslayer. Deerslayer’s inability to protect his beloved Glimmerglass is intended “to change not only our behaviour but our entire means of thinking about the natural environment.”

Sea Tales and US Navy

Avila, Beth (Independent Scholar), “She Never Became What She Once Was”: Cooper, Sedgwick, and the American Pirate Story. Cooper’s The Red Rover and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (both 1827).
Introductory Notes by Editor-in-Chief Barry Gough and Guest Editor Robert Foulke. The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 296-297. Introduction to Special Issue concerning Cooper’s maritime writings.
Clohessy, Ronald John (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). Ship of State: American Identity and Maritime Nationalism in the Sea Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. A survey of Cooper’s changing views on America as reflected in his sea novels from The Pilot to The Sea Lions.
Daly, Robert (University at Buffalo), Navigating Character: Nautical Talk and Virtue Ethics in The Pilot. Long Tom Coffin, like other “landless” fictional characters, develops his ethics at sea.
Darnell, Donald (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Cooper’s Problematic Pilot: “Unrighteous Ambitions” in a Patriotic Cause. Cooper questions the character of John Paul Jones (Mr. Gray), in The Pilot because, despite his heroism, he is not a real gentleman.
Dudley, William S. (Naval Historical Center), James Fenimore Cooper’s Ned Myers: A Life Before the Mast.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 323-329. Importance to maritime history of Cooper’s biography of an ordinary sailor.
Egan, Hugh (Ithaca College) Enabling and Disabling the Lake Erie Discussion: James Fenimore Cooper and Alexander Slidell Mackenzie Respond to the Perry/Elliott Controversy.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 343-350. How the famous dispute over the Battle of Lake Erie began as a discussion of facts, and ended up as an increasingly nebulous argument about words.
Franklin, Wayne (Northeastern University), Introduction: Becoming James Fenimore Cooper.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 299-314. Overview of the biographic study of Cooper; biographic, psychological and literary aspects of Cooper’s 1826 assumption of “Fenimore” as a middle name.
Franklin, Wayne (Northeastern University), Cooper as Passenger.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 351-357. How Cooper’s favored status as a Captain’s protegé on the Stirling in 1806-07 affected his attitudes towards the sea both in his life and in novels such as Homeward Bound. (1838).
Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), “Few Get as Far South as I Have Been”: Stimson in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Sea Lions. The annoyingly pious Stimson is essential to Cooper’s religious message.
Langley, Harold D. (Smithsonian Institution and Catholic University of America), Images of the Sailor in the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 359-370. Validity of Cooper’s portrayal of sailors in his nautical novels.
Iglesias, Luis (University of Southern Mississippi>, The “keen-eyed criticof the ocean”: James Fenimore Cooper’s Invention of the Sea Novel. The Pilot and The Red Rover as opening a new phase in American literature.
Le Seven, Emelia (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Cooper’s “John Paul Jones”; Sketching a Controversial Great-man of the Sea. Comparison of Jones in Cooper’s The Pilot (1824), and his later Lives of Distinguished American Officers (1846)
MacDougall, Hugh C., (James Fenimore Cooper Society), James Fenimore Cooper and the Sea. Cooper as novelist of the sea, naval historian, and friend of the United States Navy. (1997)
Madison, Robert D. (Northwestern University), Getting Under Way with James Fenimore Cooper. Some knowledge of sailing ship terminology will enhance enjoyment of the sea novels.
Madison, Robert D. (Northwestern University), Cooper’s Place in American Naval History. Importance of his History of the Navy of the United States of America.
Madison, Robert D. (Northwestern University), with Mary K. Madison (Northeastern University), Guides in the Wilderness: An Extract, Glossary, and Chart of Cooper’s Fictional and Factual Boat Journeys on Lake Ontario. Cruise of the Scud in The Pathfinder compared, in a chart, with the route taken by Cooper from Oswego to Niagara in 1809, as recorded in his biography of fellow-officer Melancthon Woolsey. With a glossary of marine terms used in The Pathfinder by Mary K. Madison.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Cooper’s Columbus. Irving had already written a definitive narrative of Columbus’ voyage; in Mercedes of Castile, Cooper tried and failed to tell the story in dialogue.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Cooper, Bancroft, and the Voorhees Court Martial. Cooper’s involvement in the 1845 Voorhees court martial spurred the founding of the Naval Academy, but disillusioned Cooper with the Navy.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Nelson Resartus: Legitimate Order in Cooper’s Fleet Novel.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 331-334. Lord Nelson and others as sources for The Two Admirals.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Cooper and the Sea: A Bibliographical Note.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 371-372. Survey of Cooper’s sea fiction and non-fiction, and of critical commentary about it.
Neeser, Robert W. (Secretary of the Naval Society, New York City), Cooper’s Sea Tales. Praise for sea stories, especially The Pilot, The Sea Lions, and The Water-Witch.
Philbrick, Thomas (University of Pittsburgh, emeritus), Cooper and the Literary Discovery of the Sea. Cooper’s eleven sea novels created the genre, and, more generally, that of environment interacting with fictional characters.
Philbrick, Thomas (University of Pittsburgh, emeritus), , Fact and Fiction: Uses of Maritime History in Cooper’s Afloat and Ashore.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 315-321. Unlike the earlier romantic sea stories, this novel is autobiographical, realistic, and very much about property.
Vandenbossche, Lisa (University of Rochester), Rhetoric and Reform: James Fenimore Cooper and Sailors in Antebellum America, A Romance. How seamen’s aid societies, like Cooper’s sea novels, helped romanticize the lives of sailors like the subject of Cooper’s biography Ned Myers (1843).
Walden, Dan (Baylor University), Cooper’s Coastscapes: The Significance of Setting in The Pilot. How Cooper uses the coastal setting of the novel to discuss the ambiguous realities of the Revolution and early Republic.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), The Black Sailor and The Red Rover. The comparatively favored status of African-American sailors in the early Republic allowed Cooper to explore racial diversity.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), Cooper on Corporal Punishment. Flogging, whether at sea or of a slave, is morally corrupting to the flogger.
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia), From the Inland Sea to the Pacific: The Many Vessels of James Fenimore Cooper. Different kinds of vessels in Cooper’s life, and in novels such as The Water Witch, Afloat and Ashore, The Pilot, The Crater, The Red Rover, and The Wing-and-Wing.
Whitehill, Walter Muir (Boston Athenaeum), Cooper as a Naval Historian. Importance of Cooper’s Naval History.
Williams, Cynthia Schoolar (Tufts University). Disarticulating the Nation: Reading Displacement in Cooper’s The Pilot. It isn’t really about the open ocean.

Social Views

Black, Christopher Allan (Auburn University), Benevolent Colonization or Subjugation of the Noble Savage? James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms Debate Indian Removal in the Literary Age of Jackson.
Goodier, Susan (SUNY Oneonta), Susan Fenimore Cooper and Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Views on the Political Life of Women.
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Bravo: Cooper’s Message to America . The totalitarian Venetian aristocracy exposed as a warning against economic corporate aristocracy in America.
MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Cooper’s The Headsman: What Have Swiss Executioners Got to Do with African-Americans? Is Cooper’s The Headsman (1831), set in 18ᵗʰ century Switzerland, really a critique of slavery and the treatments of African-Americans at home?
Mann, Barbara Alice (University of Toledo), “Riotous Living”: James Fenimore Cooper, Accused Aristocrat. Cooper: called “aristocratic” in America; an “ill-mannered rube” in Europe.
McWilliams, John (Middlebury College), Bragging and Dodge-ing in America, or Domestic Manners As Found. Cooper’s dismay at American manners in the 1830s, as reflected in Homeward Bound and Home as Found.
Morsellino, John (SUNY Buffalo), Cooper and Creole Democracy. Contrary to much modern criticism, Cooper is a proponant of multiculturalism, as shown in The American Democrat, The Pilot, The Prairie, and The Last of the Mohicans.
Murray, Keat (California University of Pennsylvania), “Our Situations Are Different”: Resituating Gentility and Loyalty in The Spy. Harvey Birch’s main purpose, though sacrificing his own reputation, is to serve Washington in protecting a genteel Loyalist family.
Pikus, Michael J. (Niagara County Community College), The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin and James Fenimore Cooper’s Continuing Historical Paradox. The 1846 novel expresses Cooper’s disgust at the Jacksonian America to which he has returned — both for its expulsion of Native Americans and its political destruction of a liberal landed gentry.
Rumbinas, Barbara (Independent Scholar), James Fenimore Cooper on Manipulation, Corruption, and Enfranchisement in the Jacksonian Age.
Rumbinas, Barbara and Zygmunt Mazur (Jagiellonian University), Born on Land, Shaped by the Sea: Character Development in James Fenimore Cooper’s Afloat and Ashore. How the virtuous character of the African-American slave “Neb” is developed in the twin novels Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingford.
Sawaya, Francesa (Cornell University), Between Revolution and Racism: Colonialism and the American Indian in The Prairie. Cooper’s Indians reflect colonialism and the “sentimentalized racism” of his day.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), “I am condemned to remain Eve Effingham for life”: Home as Bound. For all her liberality, the contentment Eve “finds” at “Home“ is one of isolation within Templeton.
Schramer, James J. (Youngstown State University), Shaping the American Political Landscape: James Fenimore Cooper’s and Susan Cooper’s Perspectives on Property and Polity. Especially in The American Democrat and Wyandotté.
Sillin, Sarah (University of Maryland). The Politics of International Friendship in James Fenimore Cooper’s Novels. Cooper’s approval of sympathetic friendship across cultural and national lines.
Starobin, Christina (Culinary Institute of America), “Perhaps Some Day it will be Pleasant”: Reminiscences of James Fenimore Cooper as told to Dr. Christina Starobin. Imagining what Cooper might think of today’s world.
Vandenbossche, Lisa (University of Rochester), Rhetoric and Reform: James Fenimore Cooper and Sailors in Antebellum America, A Romance. How seamen’s aid societies, like Cooper’s sea novels, helped romanticize the lives of sailors like the subject of Cooper’s biography Ned Myers (1843).
Viñuela Angulo, Urbano (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain), Dos Figuras Antagónicas en la Obra de James Fenimore Cooper Cooper’s opposition of the “gentleman” and the “demagogue,” particularly as discussed in The American Democrat.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), “The Paradise of Women”: The Domestic Sphere in Notions of the Americans. Contradictory notions of separate spheres (for women, Indians, etc.) pervade both Notions and Cooper’s other writings.
Wallace, James D. (Boston College), Cooper on Corporal Punishment. Flogging, whether at sea or of a slave, is morally corrupting to the flogger.
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia), Ramshackle Residences and Severed Arms: Architectural Foibles and Family Values in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers. Fractured family life in a wealthy but dysfunctional home.
Wegener, Signe (University of Georgia), Enjoying the Bounties of Nature: Food in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper and Food — especially in The Pioneers and The Pathfinder.

Sources

Alpern, Will J. (Prudential-Bache Securities), Indians, Sources, Critics. Cooper’s sources, especially Moravian missionaries to the Mohegan/Mohicans of Connecticut/New York; efforts to discredit Cooper by Louis Cass and Mark Twain.
Axelrad, Allan M. (California State University at Fullerton), Epiphany at Ischia: The Effect of Italy on James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Landscape Painting. How Cooper fell in love with Italian scenery, learned to tell picturesque from sublime, and feared the wilderness.
Ball, Hon. L. Chandler (Judge, Hoosick Falls, N.Y.), The Real “Natty” an Elder Brother. Claim (ca. 1870, oft-repeated, but unsubstantiated) that one Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., was the original for Cooper’s Natty Bumppo.
Becker, Robert (Independent Scholar), A Historical Background to the Tenth Chapter of Cooper’s The Monikins. Relation of the seemingly dull “protocol” chapter X to the London Conference of 1830-32, which separated Belgium from the Netherlands.
Becker, Robert (Independent Scholar), James Fenimore Cooper’s First Travel to Germany, and his Use of Engelmann/Reichard’s Manuel. The 1827 Engelmann/Reichard Manual, a German guidebook which Cooper used, and annotated, during his 1830 travels in Germany.
Butterfield, Lyman H. (Institute of Early American History and Culture), Cooper’s Inheritance: The Otsego Country and its Founders William Cooper and the early history of Otsego County.
Ganter, Granville (City University of New York Graduate Center), Voices of Instruction: Oratory and Discipline in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and The Redskins. Complexities in Cooper’s use of “Indian oratory,” and in his sources of information,
Goetzmann, William H. (University of Texas), James Fenimore Cooper : The Prairie. Hennig Cohen, ed., Landmarks of American Writing, New York: Basic Books, 1969, pp. 75-87. Analysis of novel, examining Cooper’s sources and arguing that the heart of the novel is the redemption of Ishmael Bush.
Harthorn, Steven P. (Williams Baptist College), “Plunder,” “Fixens,” and Bee Hunting: Cooper’s Manuscript Notes for The Prairie. Cooper’s brief notes inform both The Prairie and, perhaps, The Oak Openings.
Hillson, Franklin (Morgan State University), The Captivity Narrative and The Last of the Mohicans: Foundation and Modification. Cooper’s debt to the captivity narrative tradition established by Mary Rowlindson’s 1682 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God.
Holden, James Austin (State Historian of New York), The Lineage of Colonel George Monro. The real-life career and ancestry of Col. Munro (George Monro) of Fort William Henry, as provided by Scottish lawyer John A. Inglis.
Holden, James Austin (University of the State of New York), The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s Historical Inventions, and his Cave. After criticizing and investigating Cooper’s “errors” in anachronistic use of the name “Glenn’s”, renaming Lake George as “the Horican”, and giving Col. Munro his daughters Cora and Alice, Mr. Holden (a retired State Historian of New York) explores the history of Glens Falls and its caves (with many early descriptions), the true story of Lt. Col. George Monro of Fort William Henry [continued from a 1914 article], and the bridges spanning the cave-covered island.
Lampe, David (Buffalo State University), Gothic Cooper: The Shaping of The Bravo. Cooper’s debt to the Gothic “outlaw” tradition, as reflected in Friedrich Schiller’s Die Rauber [The Robbers] and Johann Heinrich Zschokke’s Abaellino, der grosse Bandit [The Bravo of Venice].
Lapp, Peter C. (Queen’s University, Kingston), Cooper and his Critics on Character: Distinctiveness, Design and Plausibility. Reliance of Cooper (and his early readers) on character trait psychology, exemplifed especially in The Pioneers, Wyandotté, Satanstoe, and The Prairie, and reactions of contemporary and modern critics.
MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Book that Made Glens Falls Famous: An Introduction to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Born in the Cave at Glens Falls in 1824, Mohicans considers seriously the role of the wilderness in creating the American character, the American Indian, and the African-American. (2000)
Madison, Karen Lentz and Madison, R.D. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie: An Introduction and Annotations. Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 32, 2016. Extensive series of reference materials, and detailed notes, concerning Cooper’s The Prairie (1827).
Madison, Robert D. (Northwestern University), Cooper’s Place in American Naval History. Importance of his History of the Navy of the United States of America.
Madison, Robert D. (Northwestern University), with Mary K. Madison (Northeastern University), Guides in the Wilderness: An Extract, Glossary, and Chart of Cooper’s Fictional and Factual Boat Journeys on Lake Ontario. Cruise of the Scud in The Pathfinder compared, in a chart, with the route taken by Cooper from Oswego to Niagara in 1809, as recorded in his biography of fellow-officer Melancthon Woolsey. With a glossary of marine terms used in The Pathfinder by Mary K. Madison.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Cooperstown’s Contribution to Cooper Scholarship. Cooperstown’s contributions to growth of Cooper appreciation.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Wish-ton-Wish: Muck or Melancholy. Sources of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) and why Cooper called the whip-poor-will a wish-ton-wish, which is a plains Indian name for prairie dog.
Madison, Robert D. (United States Naval Academy), Submission and Restoration in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. Historical background to the novel.
Madison, Robert D. (University of Arkansas). Cooper and Nuttall: the Course of Empire. The eccentric naturalist Thomas Nuttall (1786-1859) as a source for Cooper’s The Prairie and its Obed Bat.
Mann, Barbara (University of Toledo), The Other Matter at Detroit: John Heckewelder, Revolutionary Spy. Cooper’s informant on Indian culture, the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, provided General Washington with military intelligence.
Parker, Arthur C. (Past President, New York State Historical Association), Sources and Range of Cooper’s Indian Lore. Cooper relied on written sources like John Heckewelder, rather than studying living Indians near Cooperstown.
Perrin, Anne (University of Houston), Opened Frontiers, Closed Deserts: The Contradictions Between Source and Text in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie. While following much of the geographic and ethnographic material in his sources, Cooper contradicts their nationalistic, commercial, and expansionist assumptions.
Philbrick, Thomas (University of Pittsburgh, emeritus), , Fact and Fiction: Uses of Maritime History in Cooper’s Afloat and Ashore.The American Neptune, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 1997), pp. 315-321. Unlike the earlier romantic sea stories, this novel is autobiographical, realistic, and very much about property.
Pickering, James H. (Michigan State University), Enoch Crosby, Secret Agent of the Neutral Ground: His Own Story. Often credited with being Cooper’s “model” for Harvey Birch in The Spy, Enoch Crosby in 1832 told his own story (an annotated transcription).
Pickering, James H. (Michigan State University), New York in the Revolution: Cooper’s Wyandotté. Cooper’s local historical sources for the novel, depicting the Revolution in central New York as a civil war.
Pickering, James H. (Michigan State University), Fenimore Cooper in Our Time. James F. Beard’s new Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper is an exemplary compilation casting important new light on Cooper’s life, character, and thought.
Pickering, James A. (Michigan State University), Cooper’s Otsego Heritage: The Sources of The Pioneers. Sources in Cooperstown local history.
Richardson, Donna (St. Mary’s College), A Man With a Cross: Cooper’s Romantic Revision of Paradise Lost in The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s novel as a multi-cultural vision of Milton’s poem.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Cooper, Style and The Bravo. Cooper’s writing style and its sources; studies of Cooper’s style; and (in great detail) an examination of his writing style in The Bravo. [Keynote Address]
Starobin, Christina (New York University), The Monikins. Radical ideas about property, cushioned by the use of animals (from the Hindu “Ramayana”??) in Cooper’s “beast fable,” compared with The American Democrat and the Leatherstocking Tales’ Natty Bumppo.
Starna, William A. (SUNY Oneonta), Cooper’s Indians: A Critique. Ethnohistorical background to the New York Indians of the Leatherstocking Tales.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University), Fenimore Cooper’s Wyandotté and the Cyclic Course of Empire. Influence of Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University), The Importance of Flotsam and Jetsam in Editing the Unpublished Letters of James Fenimore Cooper. Problems of locating; Cooper’s handwriting, spelling, and punctuation; survey of newly found letters.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University), The Case of the Missing Corpus: Or, More Flotsam and Jetsam in Editing Fenimore Cooper. Tracking down new Cooper letters.
Walker, Warren S. (Blackburn College), The Prototype of Harvey Birch. Identifies Abraham Woodhull and Robert Townsend (both alias Samuel Culper) as models for Harvey Birch in The Spy.

Teaching & Editing Cooper

Beard, James Franklin (Clark University), Introduction. Introduction to the first Cooper Seminar; and to the Seminar series as a whole.
Bower, Anne L. (Ohio State University, Marion), Resisting Women: Feminist Students and Cooper’s The Pioneers, with a Few Thoughts Concerning Pedagogical Approaches to The Prairie. Getting students to “listen” to Cooper, and then to appreciate him.
Daly, Robert (SUNY Buffalo), From Paradox and Aporia to Cultural Hybridization and Complex Adaptive Systems: New Theories and the Uses of Cooper at the Present Time. Contemporary literary theory continues to reveal new meanings in and deepen our understanding of Cooper’s works.
Gaul, Theresa Strouth (Texas Christian University), Teaching Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans in an American Literature Survey. Conference of the South Central Modern Language Association (San Antonio, Nov. 2000). Strategies for using Mohicans effectively.
Elliott, James P. (Clark University). The Children of Natty Bumppo: Undergraduate Responses to Cooper. Teaching Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans as novel and (Michael Mann) film.
House, Kay S. (Editor-in-Chief, Cooper editions), The State of Fenimore Cooper-James F. Beard Affairs. The status of the Cooper Edition, and the nature and disposition of James F. Beard’s files and materials on Cooper.
Mann, Barbara Alice (University of Toledo). Leather-Stocking Misegenation. Teaching Cooper: the Leather-Stocking Tales were denounced as “dirty books” violating sexual, racial, and religious taboos; why not teach them that way?
Pickering, James H. (University of Houston), Cooper in New Dress: The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper. Background and editorial standards of the new “Cooper Edition” of the State University of New York Press in Albany, and review of the first four volumes.
Rans, Geoffrey (University of Western Ontario), Ordering Leather-Stocking. Reading the Leather-Stocking Tales in the order of publication (rather than that of Natty Bumppo’s life) enhances the reader’s understanding of Cooper’s complex meanings.
Sappenfield, James A. (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee), Editing James Fenimore Cooper. Theory, challenges, and limitations in the textual editing of the Cooper Edition, especially The Last of the Mohicans, The Two Admirals, and The Bravo.
Schachterle, Lance (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) Textual Editing and the Cooper Editions. Problems of editing, exemplified in The Pioneers, The Deerslayer, and especially The Spy.
Schachterle, Lance (Editor-in-Chief, Cooper Edition; Worcester Polytechnic Institute), “Cooper and His Collaborators: Recovering Cooper’s Final Intentions for His Fiction” [Abstract only] Contrary to common belief, Cooper was very concerned with the accuracy of his printed texts.
Schachterle, Lance (Editor in Chief, The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper), The Editorial Crux of “undue erring/undeserving” in The Deerslayer. Background and argument for changing the traditional reading of “undeserving” at the end of The Deerslayer to “undue erring” in the Cooper Edition, with response arguing for “undeserving” by Hugh C. McDougall.
Starobin, Christina (Ramapo College), Reading Cooper. How a teacher learned to enjoy Cooper — and to impart that enjoyment to students.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University), The Importance of Flotsam and Jetsam in Editing the Unpublished Letters of James Fenimore Cooper. Problems of locating; Cooper’s handwriting, spelling, and punctuation; survey of newly found letters.
Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University). Selling Cooper, Selling Chicago; or, Selling Mohicans as Bestseller. Teaching Cooper: Going beyond race, gender, and ethnicity to consider writing, publishing, distributing, and reading novels in the 19ᵗʰ century.