Sandra Gustafson's chapter in this section begins with the image of a map of North America in 1715 that shows the familiar British colonies abutting territories identified as French, Spanish, Iroquois, Apachee, Kikapou, Illinese, Esquimaux, Mozeemleck, and even Danish – picturing “a mixture of the familiar, the less familiar, the unknown, and the fantastic.” The map is a fitting backdrop not only for the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, the main subject of her chapter, but also for other fictional works that attempted to bring order to the chaotic and often violent conditions of life in the New World.
The map can also remind us that while literary historians – and a great many novelists themselves – have long seen the development of the novel as tied up with the history of nations, both nations and novels have origins far more complex than any simple linear narrative or national map can convey. And so while the hunt for the origins of the American novel has tended to stress indigenous forms, themes, settings, and other patterns that reinforce exceptionalist models of US literary history, we do best, as Paul Giles suggests in the opening chapter of this book, to map the American novel onto a broader swath of the globe. Specifically, Giles argues, “cultural traffic across the Atlantic in both directions” shaped a number of literary conventions, themes, and formats out of which later critics and writers would try to find patterns suggestive of a national tradition.
