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eBook
The Spy
2020,2019,2024
Overview
A year after his imitative first novel Precaution (1820)
enjoyed only modest success, James Fenimore Cooper penned The
Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground , a Revolutionary War
narrative initiating the American historical romance, a novel and a
genre that quickly put to rest the British critic Sydney Smith's
1820 quip, \"In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American
novel?\" Beginning with The Spy , everyone did. The novel
excited readers with the perilous adventures of the spy (Harvey
Birch, the Yankee peddler) and his contact Mr. Harper (George
Washington appearing incognito), both surfacing repeatedly in
various disguises and engaged in counterespionage (very clearly a
parallel to the John Andre and Benedict Arnold stories) with their
guerilla nemeses, the loyalist Cow-Boys and renegade Skinners.
The Spy revealed the clash of loyalties within families
between public and private duty to country and to self, and served
as a microcosm of the new American world, staged in the \"neutral
ground\" between opposing forces in Westchester, New York. William
Gilmore Simms, Cooper's admirer and imitator, declared \"The
publication of The Spy … was an event,\" while Boston's
North American Review agreed, \"the American Revolution is
an admirable basis, on which to found fictions of the highest order
of romantic interest.\" This fresh tale generated good American
press for the young Cooper, and so set the stage for Cooper's
career-long contributions to the development of the American novel.
The editors provide a historical introduction identifying Cooper's
sources, as well as detailed explanatory notes to enable readers
fully to appreciate the geographical and historical settings in the
novel. This scholarly edition, the eighteenth in \"The Writings of
James Fenimore Cooper,\" presents an accurate text drawing upon
eight texts, from the first edition (with two editorially revised
reprintings soon following to satisfy public demand) through the
heavily revised Bentley Standard Novels edition (1831) and the more
lightly revised Putnam Author's edition (1849). The editors provide
a full scholarly apparatus discussing their editorial choices, and
the edition has been approved by scholarly peers in the Committee
for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association.
Publisher
SUNY Press,State University of New York Press
Subject
ISBN
1438478976, 9781438478975, 9781438478968, 1438478968, 143847895X, 9781438478951
