Early American Literature

Teaching James Fenimore Cooper's novels in an undergraduate classroom today is daunting, and we know the reasons why: convoluted plots, unfamiliar historical contexts, archaic and circuitous language, lengthy narratives, and racial and gender politics ranging from ambiguous to problematic to offensive from our current point of view. The contributors to Approaches to Teaching the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper, edited by Stephen Carl Arch and Keat Murray, are realistic about the challenges of teaching Cooper but remain undaunted. Together, they seek "to empower students to engage the ideas" at the center of his novels while demonstrating Cooper's relevance today in a number of contemporary debates, including "the nature of democracy, the rights of marginalized peoples, and our relation to the natural world" (1).

The volume primarily targets instructors of upper-level courses for English majors, though a few essays address approaches suitable for graduate courses (Rochelle Raineri Zuck), general education offerings (Elaina Anne Frulla and David W. Hartwig), or international students (Anna Scannavini). An online survey of instructors who frequently teach Cooper's novels helped the editors determine an array of resources with which to open the book. These extremely helpful materials include an introduction outlining the ups and downs of Cooper's career and reception, a comprehensive and chronological list of Cooper's publications, a literature review of selected significant critical readings, commentary on the appropriateness for teaching of available editions, and a list of all the film adaptations of Cooper's works accompanied by overviews of the most significant ones. The editors [End Page 179] organized essays into sections on history and culture, the environment, language and form, and visuality and cinema. Altogether, essays in the book provide approaches to teaching eleven of Cooper's novels: the Leather-stocking Tales (1823–41), The Crater (1847), The Pilot (1824), Lionel Lincoln (1825), Satanstoe (1845), The Spy (1821), The Ways of the Hour (1850), and Wyandotté (1843). As one might expect, The Last of the Mohicans (1826) receives the most attention as the focus of six of the seventeen essays.

The most exciting essays in the book are those that offer fresh approaches to teaching Cooper. Standouts in this regard are Murray's essay explaining how to support students in applying an animal studies approach to The Pioneers and Matthew Wynn Sivil's foregrounding of the "American apocalyptic tradition" in teaching The Crater by focusing on "the human experience of environmental degradation" (93). Barbara Mann creatively examines Cooper's contributions to the genre of detective fiction in The Ways of the Hour, and Christopher J. Lukasik considers how students' own engagement with media and visual imagery can act as a lever to consider Cooper's positioning at a key moment in media history when visual images began to proliferate and circulate in new ways.

As one might expect and hope, most of the essays grapple to one degree or another with the important task of introducing students to the historical contexts within which Cooper wrote and to which he responded, including race relations (Sarah Sillin), ethnocentrism (Donna Richardson), multiculturalism (Robert Daly), and westward expansion (Michael Demson). Given this sustained focus across the volume, it is noticeable that few essays center Indigenous voices, authors, or scholarship in their efforts to complicate and elucidate Cooper's works. Betty Booth Donahue (Cherokee Nation) presents a "Native interpretation" of The Pioneers to compellingly model how one could demonstrate to students "an American Indian literary influence" in Cooper's works and engage them with Native cultures more broadly. Zuck points to three Indigenous-authored texts as she lays out her method to have students reconstruct debates about sovereignty and Indigenous land rights, and Paul Gutjahr explores the politics of casting Russell Means in Michael Mann's film adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans (1992). But beyond this, there is remarkably little visible influence of cutting-edge insights emerging from the field of Native American...