Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans

The theme of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans would seem to be containted not only in the title of the novel, but also in its subtitle: A Narrative of 1757. The two halves of the book's title both point to a historical past, and the indication of tremendous changes that had occurred on the North American continent between the Colonial era of the French and Indian War depicted in the novel, and in the prosperous bourgeois United States of America in 1826, when the novel was first published. I would like to explore how certain aspects of Fenimore Cooper's narrative illuminate this theme in different ways, and attempt to point to a vanished past -- not necessarily a Paradise Lost, but a version of history that is constructed mythically, to justify the United States by offering a myth of its early...
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