The Kentucky Review Volume 14 | Number 2 Article 4 Summer 1999 "Manifest Ambivalence": James Fenimore Cooper, the American Romance, and the Metahistories of Hegel and Herder Steven Frye Antelope Valley College Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Frye, Steven (1999) ""Manifest Ambivalence": James Fenimore Cooper, the American Romance, and the Metahistories of Hegel and Herder," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 14 : No. 2 , Article 4. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol14/iss2/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. "Manifest Ambivalence": James Fenimore hl Cooper, the American Romance, and the p Metahistories of Hegel and Herder n o: Steven Frye B p R Throughout the early nineteenth century, the romance in America aJ 1 was largely derivative in nature. In The American Historical u Romance, George Dekker argues that figures such as Cooper and R Simms relied heavily upon the generic model established by Sir Walter Scott in the Waverley novels. (:ooper's work was the first important American manifestation of this tradition. Dekker writes: "For it was Sir Walter Scott who created both the genre as we know it" along with "an immense international market" and "writers of all levels of talent, all degrees of artistic and moral seriousness, could find models in the books that Cooper wrote at the onset of the tradition" (Dekker 1987, 1).