Reading Cooper,
Teaching Cooper

Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper offers the expertise and experience of many scholar-teachers committed to promoting a shared understanding of the author and his contributions to our literary culture and to our national identity. These essays furnish the teacher and student of American culture with the reasons—and the methods—to read, to understand, and to teach Cooper. From reading and talking about Cooper, we can discover the valuable lessons he teaches us about our collective self. This volume equips readers with a systematic description of materials needed to understand and appreciate Fenimore Cooper. Contributors identify and endorse textually reliable and readily available editions of Cooper’s fiction and non-fiction; survey the vast terrain of usable primary and secondary materials that address basic biographical, critical, and bibliographical scholarship; and point out background and cultural studies and aids to teaching (including films) readily accessible to new and experienced teachers, students, and general readers. Their essays also delineate approaches to Cooper’s life and writing; they cover the broad diversity of traditional and contemporary critical theories applicable to Cooper, including the importance of his prose for contemporary students trying to understand, for example, the development of American attitudes towards democracy, racial boundary making, and the environment. The essays endeavor to explain the diversity of Cooper’s achievement (especially in his romances of forest and sea, his tales of revolutionary and colonial history, and his novels of politics and society). Finally they reveal the untold story of Cooper’s reputation and influence on later writers, here and abroad, and establish a context for talking about Cooper in a variety of disciplines, from language and literature to American studies and history.

— from the introduction by Jeffrey Walker