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 argues that Cooper's sea novels generally take place in a sort of middle ground between the shore and the sea—a neutral area that metaphorically represents the hero's inner conflict between authority and personal liberation.

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 Enchaféd 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...