Editing Cooper’s The Bravo (1831): A Work in Progress

Establishing a critical edition for Cooper’s first and finest European novel, The Bravo, presents three areas of editorial difficulty for textual scholars. First, a long cancellation of over two chapters survives, indicating that Cooper considered a direction for the tale he decided not to pursue. Yet the editors (Schachterle and Sappenfield) of the new edition for “The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper” must consider the role of this cancellation in the gestation of the novel. Second, The Bravo represents Cooper’s first attempt to reproduce a language and culture not his own. In this novel set in early eighteenth-century Venice, Cooper used Italian words and phrases in idiosyncratic ways, a situation made more textually complex by his writing well before the political and linguistic unification of Italy. Finally, the role the extant manuscripts play in creating the first printed text is unusually complicated. As generally was the case before the 1840s, Cooper wrote his first draft hurriedly, anticipating that a family member would provide a clean copy under his direction which he in turn would correct. But the first printed text, produced by Colburn & Bentley in 1831, differs radically from all extant manuscript witnesses and contains the kinds of variants Cooper characteristically made when revising. Thus our edition’s working hypothesis is that, in some documents not currently available, Cooper significantly reworked the extant manuscripts for the first appearance of the novel.