The New Nation: Irving, Cooper, and the First American Fiction

This is Unit Six of American Literature, part one of two: a country that had won its politics and had no literature to match. Unit five closed on the founding documents and the writers who held the founders to them. This unit takes the generation after, and its governing idea is one part two pays off: American literature began by naturalizing European forms rather than by inventing new ones. The writers of this period faced a practical problem. There was an argument about whether an American book should even sound different from an English one, and underneath that argument ran a trade in which pirated Scott and Dickens outsold everything a domestic author could write. What they built was an answer by relocation. Irving took German folklore, Walter Scott's advice and the eighteenth-century periodical essay, and set all of it in the Hudson Valley behind a comic persona. Cooper took Scott's historical romance and gave it a forest, a war, and a frontiersman who became the first American hero. We take the Romantic vocabulary first, then Irving, then Cooper, then the poet and the trade. By the end you will be able to state the call for a national literature and define Romanticism. To account for Irving's career and his persona. To read his two famous tales. To place Cooper's novels and their hero. And to describe Bryant's contribution and the trade behind all of it.

Four entries on the ground: the argument about a national literature, the movement that answered it, and two words for a landscape.

A politics without a literature.

AML 0501 The Call for a National Literature

After the Revolution a first generation of professional writers set out to make an American culture, and the witness records the argument: whether it should differ from Europe's at all, and whether the country needed a language of its own. Political independence did not bring independence in books. The debate was about difference from England.

Feeling, the individual, nature, imagination.

AML 0502 Romanticism: The Terms That Define It

Romanticism values feeling over calculation, the individual over the institution, nature over the town, and the imagination as a way of knowing. It arrived from Europe and found American subjects at once: an unmapped continent, a very short history, and peoples the new nation was displacing. The movement is a set of preferences rather than a rulebook.

Four subjects it kept returning to.

AML 0503 American Romanticism's Four Preoccupations

American Romantic writing returns to four subjects: the wilderness and what settlement does to it, the past invented for a country that lacked one, the isolated individual set against the community, and the supernatural admitted where realism would refuse it. Each of the four supplies a recognizable kind of story. These are preoccupations rather than a school's programme.

Overwhelming, or composed like a painting.

AML 0504 The Sublime and the Picturesque

The sublime names a landscape so vast or so violent that it overwhelms: a cataract, a storm, a mountain. The picturesque names one composed like a painting, irregular and pleasing. Romantic writers use the pair to measure a scene's effect on a mind, so both terms describe an effect on the observer rather than a property of the place.

Six entries on Irving: a satirist who invented personas, the book that made him famous abroad, and the two tales everybody still knows.

An essayist who invented personas.

AML 0505 Washington Irving, the First American Man of Letters

Youngest of eleven children in a prosperous New York merchant family, Irving read the periodical essay, Shakespeare, Goldsmith and Sterne, wrote as Jonathan Oldstyle for his brothers, and helped found *Salmagundi* in eighteen-oh-six. His *History of New-York* of eighteen-oh-nine appeared under the persona Diedrich Knickerbocker, and that comic history gave New York's writers their name.

The first American famous abroad.

AML 0506 *The Sketch Book* and the Persona of Geoffrey Crayon

In England after eighteen fifteen, urged by Walter Scott to mine German folklore, Irving published *The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.* in eighteen twenty. The anchor calls him the first American writer to win international fame, and the book mixes essays, sketches and two famous tales. The persona makes him a gentle observer rather than an arguer.

Twenty years asleep, one new flag.

AML 0507 "Rip Van Winkle"

Rip, an amiable idler with a scolding wife, wanders up into the Catskills, drinks with silent Dutchmen, and sleeps for twenty years. He returns to find his wife dead, his village altered, and Washington's portrait hanging where King George's had been. The story reaches us through a fictional historian rather than directly.

A revolution slept straight through.

AML 0508 "Rip Van Winkle" as a Fable of the Revolution

Rip sleeps through the Revolution and wakes into a republic he did not choose, which is both the story's joke and its argument. The village has grown noisier and more political, and Rip, who wanted only to be left alone, becomes a relic and a storyteller. The change arrives in the story as a new signboard.

A ghost, a rival, and a pumpkin.

AML 0509 "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Ichabod Crane, a lanky and superstitious Connecticut schoolmaster, courts the heiress Katrina Van Tassel and is driven out of the valley by a headless horseman who is probably his rival Brom Bones carrying a pumpkin. The tale keeps both explanations open, and Irving's comedy lives in that gap. The supernatural is offered and never confirmed.

German plots, set in Dutch New York.

AML 0510 Irving's Borrowed Plots and the Question of Originality

Scott's advice sent Irving to German folklore, and both of the famous tales adapt European material to the Hudson Valley. What is American about them is not the plot but the setting, the speech and the history: a national literature made by relocation rather than by invention. Originality here means naturalizing something rather than inventing it.

Five entries on Cooper: a novelist who took Scott's historical romance into the forest, and the hero he left behind him.

Scott's method, in an American forest.

AML 0511 James Fenimore Cooper and the Frontier Romance

Cooper, a judge's son who grew up at Otsego Lake and saw frontiersmen and Native people as a boy, took the historical romances of Walter Scott as his model and made the vanishing wilderness his subject. The witness calls him a pathfinder for Melville and for Twain. He wrote romances rather than records.

One life, told out of order.

AML 0512 The Leatherstocking Tales in Order

Cooper's Leatherstocking novels begin with *The Pioneers* in eighteen twenty-three and follow one frontiersman across a lifetime, though they were not written in the order that life runs. *The Last of the Mohicans* and *The Pathfinder* both belong to the series. Publication order and story order differ, which is a fact the exam can use.

A woodsman with a gentleman's honour.

AML 0513 Natty Bumppo, the First American Hero

Natty Bumppo, based partly on Daniel Boone, is a white woodsman raised among Native people, uneasy inside settlements and expert outside them. The witness calls him a gentleman frontiersman and a Jeffersonian natural aristocrat, and names him the first famous frontiersman in American literature. The type recurs for two centuries afterwards.

A chase, and a people ending.

AML 0514 *The Last of the Mohicans*

Set during the French and Indian War, the novel follows Hawkeye and his Mohican companions Chingachgook and Uncas as they escort two sisters through contested forest. Capture, pursuit and rescue drive the book, and the title announces the disappearance it both mourns and takes for granted. The title states the plot's assumption.

Noble ally, treacherous enemy, inevitable end.

AML 0515 Cooper's Indians and the Romance of a Vanishing Frontier

Cooper divides Native characters into noble allies and treacherous enemies, and writes their disappearance as both tragic and inevitable. That framing is romance rather than record: it made the frontier legible to eastern readers while treating removal as a kind of fate. Inevitability is the convention's central assumption, and it is the thing to notice.

Two entries to close the part: a young man's poem about death, and the market every writer in this unit was competing inside.

A view of death, written young.

AML 0516 William Cullen Bryant and "Thanatopsis"

Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis" as a young man, and the poem, whose title means a view of death, says that nature speaks a various language and that the grave is a couch shared by all. It made blank verse an American instrument. The consolation the poem offers is natural rather than Christian.

Free British novels, on every counter.

AML 0517 The Publishing Trade and the Pirated Novel

Both sources make the same point: the American literary tradition owes as much to the growth of the publishing industry as to individual authors, and sales of American books were dwarfed by pirated editions of Scott and Dickens. Without international copyright a domestic author competed against free British novels, and the economics shaped which books got written.

That is the answer the first generation gave. Part two takes the forms it settled into. You can state the problem this generation faced, a country with its own politics arguing about whether its books should sound different from England's, and you can define Romanticism as a set of preferences for feeling, the individual, nature and the imagination. You can name its four American preoccupations and use the sublime and the picturesque as measures of a scene's effect. You can account for Irving, who invented personas, gave New York's writers their name with a comic history, and became the first American writer to win an international audience. You can read "Rip Van Winkle" as a man sleeping through a revolution and waking to a changed signboard, and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a tale that offers a ghost and a rival with a pumpkin and refuses to choose. You can place Cooper's five novels, out of order, around a frontiersman who is a natural aristocrat outside towns, and notice that the title of his best-known book states its own assumption. And you can set Bryant's blank verse and the pirated-novel trade beside all of it.