Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Sea in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature - Charles H. Adams (essay date 1988)


The Sea in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature - Charles H. Adams (essay date 1988)

Charles H. Adams (essay date 1988)

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...

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