ABSTRACT
This second chapter of American Literature and American Identity turns to James Fenimore Cooper’s enormously influential novel, The Last of the Mohicans. Though this novel is often condemned for its treatment of Amerindians as a vanishing race, this chapter argues that it is relatively progressive on the whole. Indeed, Cooper’s development of interracial bonding—both in friendship and, even more, in romantic love—is deeply opposed to some common racist attitudes of the time. The novel is not without ambiguity and ambivalence, however. Cooper tacitly criticizes the most common cognitive models used to demean Native Americans, but he also employs versions of those models, if often in less harmful forms.
