SOURCE: Faherty, Duncan. “The Borderers of Civilization: Susan Fenimore Cooper's View of American Development.” In Susan Fenimore Cooper: New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works, edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, pp. 109-26. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Faherty illustrates Cooper's advocacy of landscape and emerging New World culture as primary influences upon American architectural development through a discussion of Rural Hours and “A Dissolving View.”

Within her best-known work, Rural Hours (1850), and in an important but long-neglected essay “A Dissolving View” (1852), Susan Cooper calls for the development of uniquely American cultural forms reflective of the nation's democratic doctrines. Intimately linked to this appeal was her description of nature as essential nourishment for the national imagination. Implicit in her argument was a second call: for the necessity of preserving this resource. By becoming familiar with their native environment, Americans would locate...