Constantinesco, Thomas <br/><br/>
Farce on Neutral Ground: Romance and Revolution in James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy 

 -  2009.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 87 
<br/><br/> Under cover of glorifying the Revolution as a patriotic struggle for democracy, The Spy, Cooper's first historical romance, orchestrates retrospectively the advent of a genteel republic. The fiction of history thus serves to legitimize the social hierarchy of Cooper's America. Yet this study argues that, even as the narrative unfolds its conservative logic, the writing of the romance exposes the artificiality of its own project. Pointing to its status as fiction, The Spy depicts the Revolution as a masquerade and lays bare the United States' duplicitous origins.