ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by outlining the publishing context that framed the initial production and downmarket circulation of The Pathfinder in America. Taking up the transatlantic nature of print communication circuits, it then considers reproduction of The Pathfinder in Europe. The chapter focuses on French novelist Gustave Aimard, and points to the adaptation of Cooperesque themes by popular European authors, and more specifically to how the transatlantic exchange of historical novels between America and France contributed to the making and reading of American history. As in the Leatherstocking novels, Aimard describes individual gifts to differentiate the nature of races, for instance, by pointing to Ichabod's rejection of the Native practice of scalping. In the shadow of the Leatherstocking novels, The Frontiersmen is at once eerily familiar and yet strikingly empty – Cooperesque in a disconcerting way. The history of the frontier romance in America, at least as a popular form of reading, may be said to begin with Cooper's Pioneers.
