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Emerson has been called many things, but except by theological stalwarts outraged by the Divinity School “Address,” “radical” has seldom been one of them. Disposed by taste and training to the rule of gentlemen, he was appalled by the Jacksonian rabble even as he saw it impelled by a feeling of human worth much like his own. Emerson's practical politics were instinctively conservative; the political coloring of his writings is harder to assess. It was once commonplace to observe that the literary Emerson had no politics at all and little sense of history as progressive or teleological. Nature and the Soul were timeless; only the outward costumes and idioms changed. More recently, Emerson has been historicized by embedding him within an American world “poised,” as Carolyn Porter has said, “on the verge of the most accelerated capitalist development in modern history.” Surely no contemporary registered the new economic forces more acutely than Emerson did. Yet if the Emerson of the 1940s and 'SOS was construed as loftily indifferent to the currents of the age, the Emerson of the 1980s and '90s has been portrayed as ideologically captive to them.

ESPITE its position for over a century as "Cooper's most famous and most widely read work,"' The Last of the Mohicans has more recently come to be regarded (along with The Pathfinder) as the least rewarding of the Leatherstocking Tales.2 From Robert E. Spiller to Henry Nash Smith to John P. McWilliams, critics have rescued Cooper from the shelf of boys' literature by emphasizing his "passionate concern with the problem of society in the United States,"3 an approach which has found new interest in a book like The Prairie but has depressed the reputation of a narrative which, while better told, seems to lack the social reference which elevates Cooper's novels from adventure stories to paradigms of the nation's experience.4 If, however, The Last of the Mohicans is the most heavily plotted of Cooper's books, it is also, I would argue, among the most carefully patterned, and its commitment to the problem of America is as full and intense as The Prairie's. The difference between The Last of the Mohicans and the other Leatherstocking Tales is one of technique. The discourse of the book is conducted almost entirely on the level of physical action without the overt reflections on nature and society which provide an interpretive gloss in The Pioneers and The Prairie. Plot itself, not commentary, is here the