Preface

Summary

The idea for an extended study of the American historical romance came to me in 1964 in the course of writing a critical survey of Cooper's fiction interlaced with biographical chapters analysing the connections between this fiction and the main issues in Jacksonian politics. I was able (so I believed) to see and explain how Cooper adapted Scott's narrative device of the “wavering hero” to American circumstances and his own very unwavering temperament. But I was also able to see that there was much more to the Scott–Cooper relationship than I could then explain or discover from extant scholarship, and that this “much more” involved other major American historical fictionalists as well. My work on Cooper's fiction and politics was followed by a study of the connections between Coleridge's poetry and the eighteenth-century European literature of Sensibility – a project seemingly unrelated to the question of Scott's American legacy but actually of close relevance inasmuch as it concerned contemporaries and predecessors of Coleridge and Scott who, with them, were the master spirits of Romanticism, including its American wing.

I mention these earlier books because they help explain the genetic and “mid-Atlantic” character of the present one. A full explanation would involve more personal and professional history than seems appropriate in the preface to a work of literary scholarship, but I cannot fail to mention one part of that history.