Sinking Eden: Cooper's The Crater, Allegory, and Terraqueous America

Recent attention to terraqueous geographies in American literature and culture, ranging from Monique Allewaert’s discussion of the “Swamp Sublime” in Ariel’s Ecology (2013) to the Archipelagic American... [ view full abstract ]

Recent attention to terraqueous geographies in American literature and culture, ranging from Monique Allewaert’s discussion of the “Swamp Sublime” in Ariel’s Ecology (2013) to the Archipelagic American Studies (2017) taken up in a recent essay collection of that name, help us to think about continental watery spaces in global terms. In “Sinking Eden: Cooper’s The Crater, Allegory, and Terraqueous America,” Melissa Gniadek engages this type of thinking, turning to the Pacific in order to rethink U.S. continental geographies through engagement with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater; or, Vulcan’s Peak: A Tale of the Pacific (1847). While acknowledging that this novel relies on familiar allegorical tropes to facilitate political satire and critique, using the physical rise and fall of a Pacific island to advance commentary on the antebellum U.S., Gniadek reads the novel with a focus on its terraqueous landscapes and plots rather than on the arc of the rise and fall of a utopian island space. She does so in order to rethink the place of the terraqueous in Cooper’s novels of land and sea more generally, and argues that including islands in recent conversations about swamps and coastlines can help the oceanic turn to illuminate nineteenth-century continental tensions in different ways. A little read Cooper novel might therefore have new life in our own contemporary moment of political crisis and rising waters.