James Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln: literary appropriations in nineteenth century North American romance prose

Abstract

In 1824, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper set out on a research travel to the city of Boston, Massachusetts, so that he could write the historical novel Lionel Lincoln. The author’s initial intention was to publish a series of thirteen novels, each one with the setting of one of the thirteen original colonies of the United States of America during the events of the War of Independence (1775-1783), entitled Legends of the thirteen republics. However, the failure of this particular work buried the idea, and Lionel Lincoln was left as the only one of the author’s works to be considered by Cooper himself as a “historical work”. Despite it not being a success - it neither found an audience, nor critical acclaim - Lionel Lincoln is an exercise in a literary genre that still did not have many practitioners in the American continent, and shows the appropriations of multiple kinds of narratives by its author, especially the Gothic romance and accounts of military campaigns. The aim of this article is to analyze some of these appropriations as they relate to the establishment of a form of novelistic prose that was still in development in the nineteenth century.