SOURCE: "Cooper's Sea Fiction and 'The Red Rover'," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 2, Autumn, 1988, pp. 155-68.

In the following essay, Adams contends that the ocean in James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Red Rover "represents a place where liberation and law meet, a place where the republican concept of full identity can be nurtured. "

Cooper's sea novels generally blur the traditional distinction in maritime literature between sea and shore. The dichotomy persists in Cooper's works between the shore as a realm of conflict and the sea as one of resolution between, as W. H. Auden puts it in The Enchafed Flood, a state of "disorder" and a world of harmony, where change and turmoil are "not merely at the service of order, but inextricably intertwined, indeed identical with it."¹ But most of the action in a typical Cooper narrative takes place somewhere between these two worlds. In...