Title Index

This webpage indexes articles and papers according to the works by Cooper with which they are particularly concerned. Only those that deal extensively with specific works or groups of works are included here.

Recognized Groups of Cooper Works

Listed here are papers and articles dealing with groups of Cooper works, generally or specifically. For papers or articles dealing only with specific books within a group, click on the appropriate title. (We have not tried to list individually the many books within the Indian and Frontier and the Sea categories.)

All Cooper’s Fiction

• 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.) Copyright © 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. [Especially detailed treatment of The Bravo and The Crater]
• 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.

The Leatherstocking Tales

(The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer)

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Axelrad, Allan (California State University, Fullerton), Leather-Stocking’s Mother. Natty Bumppo’s early life, as presented by Susan Fenimore Cooper in her 1876 Introduction to The Deerslayer (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin).
• Axelrad, Allan M. (Emeritus, California State University, Fullerton), The Leather-Stocking Tales and Epic Poetry. 
• 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.
• Egger, Irmgard (University of Vienna), Cooper and German Readers. In reading Cooper Germans could dream of a freedom not found in daily life, as German children still do; but his socio/political criticism has been ignored.
• Egger, Irmgard (University of Vienna), The Leatherstocking Tales as Adapted for German Juvenile Readers. Making Cooper fit — literarily, morally, and politically — for German youth.
• 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?
• 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.
• Mani, Lakshmi (Rochester Institute of Technology), James Fenimore Cooper and the Apocalpyse. End-of-the world motifs in the Leatherstocking Tales and The Crater .
• 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.
• 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?
• 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.
• 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”.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Starna, William A. (SUNY Oneonta), Cooper’s Indians: A Critique. Ethnohistorical background to the New York Indians of the Leatherstocking Tales.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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, 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

The Effingham Novels

([The Pioneers], Homeward Bound, Home as Found)

• MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society), Which Effinghams Do We Choose? 

The Littlepage Novels

(Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, The Redskins)

• 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.
• 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).

Indian and Frontier Novels

The Otsego Novels

(The Pioneers, [Homeward Bound], Home as Found, The Deerslayer, Wyandotté)

• 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.
• Philbrick, Thomas L. (University of Pittsburgh), Cooper Country in Fiction. Significance of place in Cooper’s fiction, especially in the four “Otsego novels.”

Sea Stories

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. (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.
• 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.

The European Novels

(The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, The Headsman)

• 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.
• 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.

The Travel Books

(Gleanings in Europe: France, Italy, England, Switzerland, The Rhine {Switzerland, Part II})

• Philbrick, Thomas L. (University of Pittsburgh), Cooper in Europe: The Travel Books. Background to the five travel books.

Individual Works

Fiction

Novels

1820 Precaution

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• 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.

1821 The Spy

• 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.
• Barton, John Cyril (University of Missouri, Kansas City). Cooper, Livingston, and Death Penalty Reform Cooper’s reactions to the debate on capital punishment, especially in The Spy and The Ways of the Hour.
• 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.
• 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.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• 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.
• 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.
• Liu, Linda Yang (Stanford University), Minor Protagonists and Republican Heroism in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy. Significance of “minor” characters, notably Harvey Birch.
• 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.
• 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.
• McClellan, Kendall (Binghamton University), A Less than Revolutionary Romance: Leadership, Liberty, and “the People” in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy. Differing views of populism in Cooper’s novel and in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s The Linwoods.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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).
• 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 (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.
• 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.
• 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.

1823 The Pioneers [Leatherstocking Tales] [The Otsego Novels]

• 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).
• 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.
• 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.”
• Chapman, Schuyler (University of Pittsburgh), Imperfect Fluidity: Mutable Citizenship and the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper’s ambivilent approach to shifting allegiances in The Pioneers and The Pilot.
• 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 Linday Skinner’s modern Debby Barnes, Trader (1932), and with Cooper.
• Cody, David (Hartwick College), Bierce and the Cooperian Uncanny. Ambrose Bierce’s possible borrowings from gothic moments in Cooper — notably in The Pioneers, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1876)]
• Davey, Michael J. (Ohio State University), Plainly Bred in the Woods: Manners as Mode in The Pioneers. Not just autobiographic nostalgia, the novel is also an outsider’s critique of genteel society in 19ᵗʰ century America.
• 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.
• Dekker, George G. (Stanford University), Border and Frontier: Tourism in Scott’s Guy Mannering and Cooper’s The Pioneers. Two approaches to the “tourist” and cultural exoticism.
• Foulon, Jacqueline (Université de Paris), Breaks and Continuities in Cooper’s Representation of the Indian. Four different approaches to Indians, as represented in The Pioneers (realism); The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (idealistic imagination); Wyandotté (disillusion); and The Oak Openings (“a new Eden”).
• Jajko, Alana J. (Bucknell University), James Fenimore Cooper and the Quest for American Identity: Setting a Precursor for America’s National Parks. ​​​​​​​
• 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.
• Kadish, Philip (Hunter College, CUNY), Race-Science Rhetoric as Political Panacea: James Fenimore Cooper’s Influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cooper’s adoption and criticism of racial theories of Buffon and Condorcet, in The Pioneers (1823), Notions of the Americans (1828) and The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829).
• 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.
• 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.
• Lockard, Joseph (University of California at Berkeley), Cooper, Heidegger and the Language of Death: Or, Why is Natty Bumppo Speaking Ebonics?The Pioneers turkey-shooting scene seen as genocidal racism, an example of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s “inauthentic Da-sein.”
• 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 (James Fenimore Cooper Society), The Pioneers: Creator of a New York Frontier Image. What kind of frontier did the novel really portray?
• 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.
• 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, Ryan (University of California, Berkeley), The Terror in Templeton: Burkean Communities in The Pioneers.
• Nesmith, Christopher (University of South Carolina-Columbia). Settling Down: Staging Masculinity in Cooper’s Pioneers. The Pioneers and the progression of settlement.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Pickering, James A. (Michigan State University), Cooper’s Otsego Heritage: The Sources of The Pioneers. Sources in Cooperstown local history.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Sivils, Matthew Wynn (Iowa State University), Blood in the Watershed: Systems Ecology, Violence, and Cooper’s The Pioneers.
• Sweet, Nancy (Columbia University), “Sweet but Commanding”: The Disobedient Daughter in Cooper’s The Pioneers. Elizabeth Temple as rebellious but virtuous heroine.
• 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.
• 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.
• Von Mehren, Ann L. (Bowling Green State University), The Manumission and Suffrage Laws of the State of New York as Portrayed in The Pioneers.
• 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.

1823 The Pilot

• Chapman, Schuyler (University of Pittsburgh), Imperfect Fluidity: Mutable Citizenship and the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper’s ambivilent approach to shifting allegiances in The Pioneers and The Pilot.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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)
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Williams, Cynthia Schoolar (Tufts University). Disarticulating the Nation: Reading Displacement in Cooper’s The Pilot. It isn’t really about the open ocean.

1825 Lionel Lincoln

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Williams, Kennedy Jr. (University of Kentucky), Cooper’s Use of American History. Especially in Lionel Lincoln and The Last of the Mohicans.

1826 The Last of the Mohicans [Leatherstocking Tales]

• Dostal, Michelle (Oklahoma State University), “Blood Purer and Richer”: The Disruptive Presence of Cora in The Last of the Mohicans.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 (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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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”).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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”.
• 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.
• 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.
• Viñuela Angulo, Urbano (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain), Introducción — El último mohicano. Introduction to a 1997 Spanish edition of The Last of the Mohicans, including list of known Spanish translations.

• 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.”
• 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.
• 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.
• 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).
• 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.
• Williams, Kennedy Jr. (University of Kentucky), Cooper’s Use of American History. Especially in Lionel Lincoln and The Last of the Mohicans.
• 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.
• Zogas, Peter (University of Rochester), Reading Cooper’s Modernity. Competing temporal horizons of colonial and pre-colonial time in The Last of the Mohicans.

1827 The Prairie [Leatherstocking Tales]

• 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.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1876)]
• 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”?
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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), “Their Waste Has Done It All”:The Prairieas 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).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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), Civilization and its Discontents: Freud Meets Cooper in The Prairie. Considering this novel in the light of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, especially as concerns its treatment of the conflict between personal freedom and entering a social compact.
• 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.
• Starobin, Christina (Saugerties, New York), Who Owns the Land and Who Cares for It. Metaphors of birds and beasts in The Prairie.
• 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’sThe Prairieand, especially, The Crater.
• Williams, Jericho (Spartanburg Methodist College), Guide (Me) Dog: A New Frontier of Companionship in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie.

1828 The Red Rover

• Avila, Beth (Independent Scholar), “She Never Became What She Once Was”: Cooper, Sedgwick, and the American Pirate Story. Cooper’sThe Red Roverand Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (both 1827).
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1881-84)]
• Davis, James III (Georgia State University). The Red Roverand Looking at the Nautical Machine for Naturalist Tendencies. The “nautical machine” of the complex sailing vessel can harm men, as industrial America would do so later.
• Iglesias, Luis (University of Southern Mississippi), The “keen-eyed criticof the ocean”: James Fenimore Cooper’s Invention of the Sea Novel.The Pilot andThe Red Rover as opening a new phase in American literature.
• 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.
• 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.

1829 The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish

• 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.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• Foulon, Jacqueline (Université de Paris), Breaks and Continuities in Cooper’s Representation of the Indian. Four different approaches to Indians, as represented in The Pioneers (realism); The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (idealistic imagination); Wyandotté (disillusion); and The Oak Openings (“a new Eden”).
• Kadish, Philip (Hunter College, CUNY), Race-Science Rhetoric as Political Panacea: James Fenimore Cooper’s Influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cooper’s adoption and criticism of racial theories of Buffon and Condorcet, in The Pioneers (1823), Notions of the Americans (1828) and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829).
• 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), 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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”.
• 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.

1830 The Water-Witch

• 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.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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).
• 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.
• MacDougall, Hugh (James Fenimore Cooper Society, The Water Witch (1829) — a Novel Cooper Wrote to Please Himself. Feeling free to express himself, Cooper packs this novel with views that seem both libertarian and even radical.
• 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.

1831 The Bravo [See also under European Novels]

• 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.) Copyright © 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. [Extensive discussion of The Bravo]
• Cooper, James Fenimore, A Letter to His Countrymen. Cooper angrily attacks American press reviews of The Bravo and The Heidenmauer; presents theory of limited Constitutional powers and dangers of legislative usurpation; and says he will quit writing.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• 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].
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 (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]
• 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.

1832 The Heidenmauer [See also under European Novels]

• Cooper, James Fenimore, A Letter to His Countrymen. Cooper angrily attacks American press reviews of The Bravo and The Heidenmauer; presents theory of limited Constitutional powers and dangers of legislative usurpation; and says he will quit writing.
• 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.
• 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”).

1833 The Headsman [See also under European Novels]

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• Drescher, Rudolf. Switzerland in Cooper’s Works. Translated by Robert Becker (Independent Scholar)
• 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?

1835 The Monikins

• 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).
• 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.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• 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.
• Murray, Keat (California University of Pennsylvania), “Singularly Situated” in Antarctica: Transatlantic Imaginaries in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Monikins. A novel that deserves more critical attention.
• 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.

1838 Homeward Bound [Effingham Novels]

• 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).
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• 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), 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

1838 Home as Found [Effingham Novels] [The Otsego Novels]

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• 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), 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

1840 The Pathfinder [Leatherstocking Tales]

• 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.
• 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.
• Cody, David (Hartwick College), Bierce and the Cooperian Uncanny. Ambrose Bierce’s possible borrowings from gothic moments in Cooper — notably in The Pioneers, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1876)]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
• Rust, Richard D., (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), The Art of The Pathfinder. The novel as a carefully crafted work of art.
• Samuels, Shirley (Cornell University), Promoting the Nation in James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe: Nationalism and the Historical Novel. [Keynote Address for the Cooper Conference.] Creating a nation in early American historical fiction, notably in Cooper’s The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, and in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
• 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.
• 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.

1840 Mercedes of Castile

• Harthorn, Steven P. (University 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.
• 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.
• 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.

1841 The Deerslayer [Leatherstocking Tales] [The Otsego Novels]

• 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 (California State University, Fullerton), Leather-Stocking’s Mother. Natty Bumppo’s early life, as presented by Susan Fenimore Cooper in her 1876 Introduction to The Deerslayer (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin).
• 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.
• Cody, David (Hartwick College), Bierce and the Cooperian Uncanny. Ambrose Bierce’s possible borrowings from gothic moments in Cooper — notably in The Pioneers, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1876)]
• Flynn, Rebecca (University of Houston), Gendered Space and Judith Hunter in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. Complexities of gender roles on the frontier.
• 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.
• Harthorn, Steven P. (University 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.
• Jennings, Anne (San Jose State University), In Defense of Judith: A Re-Reading of Cooper’s The Deerslayer as Social History. A more positive image of Judith Hutter than that which Cooper provides.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Reader.Deerslayer deals with surface appearances and hidden realities.
• 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.
• 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 Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.
• 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.”
• Samuels, Shirley (Cornell University), Promoting the Nation in James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe: Nationalism and the Historical Novel. [Keynote Address for the Cooper Conference.] Creating a nation in early American historical fiction, notably in Cooper’s The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, and in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
• 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, 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.
• 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)
• Siewers, Alfred K. (Bucknell University), Cooper’s Green World: Adapting Ecosemiotics to the Mythic Eastern Woodlands. A semiotic and philosophical examination of The Deerslayer.
• Siewers, Alfred Kentigern (Bucknell University), Cooper, Coleridge, and Re-Imagining a Native Cosmology. Literary and philosophical analysis of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Cooper’s The Deerslayer.
• 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.
• 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.
• Starna, William A. (Emeritus, SUNY College at Oneonta), “That they might sweep the Indians from the land”: Assessing the Place of Native People in The Deerslayer. ​​​​​​​
• 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.
• 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.
• Tamer, Nanette C. (Villa Julie College), Sibi Imperiosus: Cooper’s Horatian Ideal of Self-Governance in The Deerslayer. Comparisons between Cooper’s and Horatio’s notions of virtue.
• 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 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.
• 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.”

1842 The Two Admirals

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

1842 The Wing-and-Wing

• 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.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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.
• 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.
• Anna Scannavini (Università dell’Aquila), Cooper’s Italian Seas. The varied significance to Cooper of the seas around Italy.

1843 Wyandotté [The Otsego Novels]

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• Foulon, Jacqueline (Université de Paris), Breaks and Continuities in Cooper’s Representation of the Indian. Four different approaches to Indians, as represented in The Pioneers (realism); The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (idealistic imagination); Wyandotté (disillusion); and The Oak Openings (“a new Eden”).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

1844 Afloat and Ashore

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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.
• 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.

1844 Miles Wallingford

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [ Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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.
• 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.

1845 Satanstoe [The Littlepage Novels]

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• Daly, Robert (SUNY University at Buffalo), Networked Communities in Satanstoe: The Dialectical Pluralism of Cooper’s Late Style. Corny Littlepage tells his story both as it happens and in retrospect.
• Daly, Robert (SUNY, University at Buffalo), Consulting Mother Doortje: An American Aesthetics and Ethics of Uncertainty, Along with Other Diachronic Watersheds in Satanstoe. 
• 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.
• 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”).
• 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 canceled authorial footnote about an African-American psychic medium in Cooperstown illustrates the cultural tensions surrounding the representation of race in the novel.

1845 The Chainbearer [The Littlepage Novels]

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• 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”.
• 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.

1846 The Redskins [The Littlepage Novels]

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• 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.
• 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.
• Hecht, Roger (SUNY Oneonta): “Worse than trash”? Politics, Poetry, and the Anti-Rent Press. The popular press background to The Redskins.
• 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.
• 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.

1847 The Crater

• 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.) Copyright © 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. [Extensive discussion of The Crater]
• 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.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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), 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“.
• Mani, Lakshmi (Rochester Institute of Technology), James Fenimore Cooper and the Apocalpyse. End-of-the world motifs in the Leatherstocking Tales and The Crater.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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”).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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’sThe Prairie and, especially, The Crater.
• 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.”

1848 Jack Tier

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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).
• Lampe, David (Buffalo State University), Gender on the Rocks: Cooper’s Jack Tier, or the Florida Reef. Treatment of gender, humorous and otherwise, in Jack Tier and in The Red Rover.
• Walker, Jeffrey (Oklahoma State University). Reading Rose Budd; Or, Tough Sledding in Jack Tier. Cooper tackles serial installment writing, with changing titles and plans.

1848 The Oak Openings

• Arch, Stephen Carl (Michigan State University), Oak Openings and the Michigan Frontier in the Antebellum American Literary Imagination.
• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introduction [Pages and Pictures (1861)]
• Foulon, Jacqueline (Université de Paris), Breaks and Continuities in Cooper’s Representation of the Indian. Four different approaches to Indians, as represented in The Pioneers (realism); The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (idealistic imagination); Wyandotté (disillusion); and The Oak Openings (“a new Eden”).
• Harthorn, Steven P. (Williams Baptist College), “Plunder,” “Fixens,” and Bee Hunting: Cooper’s Manuscript Notes for The Prairie. Cooper’s brief notes inform bothThe Prairie and, perhaps, The Oak Openings.
• Lampe, David (SUNY Buffalo State), Artful Antithesis in Cooper’s Oak Openings, or The Bee Hunter. 
• 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.
• 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.

1849 The Sea Lions

• Cooper, Susan Fenimore, Introductions [Pages and Pictures (1861) and Household Edition (1881-84)]
• 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.
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

1850 The Ways of the Hour

• Barton, John Cyril (University of Missouri, Kansas City). Cooper, Livingston, and Death Penalty Reform Cooper’s reactions to the debate on capital punishment, especially in The Spy and The Ways of the Hour.
• Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Northwestern-St. Paul), Prison Philanthropy Journals and Cooper’s The Ways of the Hour.
• Mann, Barbara Alice (University of Toledo), “Cup and Saucer” Divorce: Cooper and Women’s Rights.
• 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.

Other Fiction

1823 Tales for Fifteen [two short stories, Imagination and Heart]

• MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), First and Last Tales: “Imagination” and “The Lake Gun”. Introduction to two little-known Cooper short stories.
• 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.”

1832 “No Steamboats” [short story — in French]

• Iannucci, Alisa Marko (Boston College). “Things less evident”: Cosmopolitan Cooper. Cross-cultural understanding, as reflected in Notions of the Americans and “No Steamboats”.

1843 Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief [novelette]

• Harthorn, Steven P. (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Cooper’s Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief as a Defense of Authorship. 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, 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).

1848 Upside Down [play]

1850 The Lake Gun [short story]

• MacDougall, Hugh C. (James Fenimore Cooper Society), First and Last Tales: “Imagination” and “The Lake Gun”. Introduction to two little-known Cooper short stories.

Non-fiction

1828 Notions of the Americans [major study of American culture]

• 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.
• Blakemore, Steven (Florida Atlantic University), Cooper and the Indian Imaginary: The Indian Removal Act of 1830 in Notions of the Americans. Two years before the 1830 Removal Act, Cooper gives his complex thinking about the possible future of Native Americans.
• 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.
• Iannucci, Alisa Marko (Boston College). “Things less evident”: Cosmopolitan Cooper. Cross-cultural understanding, as reflected in Notions of the Americans and “No Steamboats”.
• Kadish, Philip (Hunter College, CUNY), Race-Science Rhetoric as Political Panacea: James Fenimore Cooper’s Influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cooper’s adoption and criticism of racial theories of Buffon and Condorcet, in The Pioneers (1823), Notions of the Americans (1828) and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829).
• 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.”
• 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.
• 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.

1831 Letter to General Lafayette [American finances]

1831 Contributions for the Poles

• Lenz, Bradley A. (Independent Scholar), James Fenimore Cooper’s Polish Cause.

1834 A Letter to His Countrymen [complaints of the author]

• Yueling, Ma (South China University of Technology), Cooper and Democratic Elitism.
• Foulon, Jacqueline (Université de Paris), A Letter to His Countrymen. An analysis of Cooper’s message.

c.1836 The Eclipse, published posthumously in 1869 [short essay]

• Wallace, James D. (Boston College), Cooper on Corporal Punishment. Flogging, whether at sea or of a slave, is morally corrupting to the flogger.

1836 Gleanings in Europe: Switzerland, original title Sketches of Switzerland [The Travel Books]

• 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.
• Schramer, James J. (Youngstown State University), Gleanings of a Harvest Already Gathered: Recollection & Response in Cooper’s European Landscapes.

1836 Gleanings in Europe: The Rhine, original title Sketches of Switzerland. Part Second [The Travel Books]

• 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.

1837 Gleanings in Europe: France, original title Gleanings in Europe [The Travel Books]

1837 Gleanings in Europe: England [The Travel Books]

• 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.

1838 Gleanings in Europe: Italy [The Travel Books]

• Denne, Constance Ayers (Baruch College, City University of New York), Cooper in Italy. Background, composition, and reception of Gleanings in Europe: Italy.
• Anna Scannavini (Università dell’Aquila), Cooper’s Italian Seas. The varied significance to Cooper of the seas around Italy.
• 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.

1838 The American Democrat [political science]

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Yueling, Ma (South China University of Technology), Cooper and Democratic Elitism.

1838 The Chronicles of Cooperstown [local history]

1839 The History of the Navy of the United States of America [major naval history]

• 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.
• 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.

1843 Ned Myers [biography]

• 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) 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.
• 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).

c.1845 The Battle of Plattsburgh Bay, published posthumously in 1869 [lecture]

1844 The Cruise of the Somers [naval article]

c.1845 Old Ironsides, published posthumously in 1853 [naval article]

1846 Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers [biographies]

• Le Seven, Emelia (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Cooper’s “John Paul Jones”; Sketching a Controversial Great-man of the Sea. Comparison of Jones in Cooper’sThe Pilot (1824), and his later Lives of Distinguished American Officers (1846)
• 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).
• 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.

1851 New York [introduction to uncompleted history of New York City, to be called The Towns of Manhattan]

• 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.”
• 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.

1852 American and European Scenery Compared [essay in The Home Book of the Picturesque: or, American Scenery, Art, and Literature (New-York: G.P. Putnam, 1852), pp. 51-69]

• 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.