MLR, 105.4, 2010 concentrated on the textwhile at the same time contextualizing the poem. This concentration achieves what the disparate parts of the preceding sections do not. Queen Mary University of London Leonard Olschner Literarische Wallfahrt gen Cooperstown: Zur Funktion James Fenimore Coopers und seiner Schriften imWerk Arno Schmidts. By Christian Hein. (Epistemata: Literaturwissenschaft, 664) Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2009. 334 pp. 49.80. ISBN 978-3-8260-4013-9. Those acquainted with the work of the German experimental author Arno Schmidt will know that he was not only a prolific, ifat times enigmatic, novelist and storyteller, but also an inspired essayist and passionate rediscoverer of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German and English authors. Over the past two to three decades Schmidt scholars have produced a plethora of studies on Schmidt's relationship with the authors he admitted into his personal literary canon, which ranged from Wieland, JeanPaul, and Dickens toCarroll, Doblin, and Joyce, tomention only a few. Less known may be the fact that Schmidt was also a highly regarded translator, translating such nineteenth-century English-language classics as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and James Fenimore Cooper into an idiosyncratically Schmidt-attuned German. The American author James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), the creator of the famous Leatherstocking tales, is among the handful of English-language authors Schmidt both wrote about and translated. Throughout his oeuvrewe find Schmidt's fictional protagonists referencing or alluding to Cooper's works and fictional characters, most notably Natty Bumppo and Narra-Mattah. Schmidt's firstessay on Cooper was published in the 1958 essay collection Dya Na Sore; his translation of Cooper's Conanchety published in 1962, included a sixty-page commentary; and in 1964 he broadcast two radio reviews on Cooper's work; in the final years of his life (Schmidt died in 1979 at the age of 65) he went on to translate Cooper's 'Littlepage' trilogy comprising the novels Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins. Clearly, there is sufficientmaterial here for a comparative study of the two authors. But Christian Hein's new book on the subject disappoints. Hein attempts too much and achieves too little.Here we have a book with some 320 pages, excluding bibliography, ofwhich atmost half is actually devoted to a comparative analysis. The other half of the book comprises an 8 5-page biographical account of Cooper's lifeand times (Chapter 2, pp. 49-135) thathas no bearing whatsoever on Arno Schmidt; an extended 60-page Bakhtinian discussion of carnivalization in Cooper's novel TheMonikins (Chapter 4, pp. 178-238); and a 10-page discussion of Renate Lachmann's and Gerard Genette's concepts of intertextuality and hypo and hypertextuality (Chapter 5, Introduction and 5.1, pp. 265-275). Granted, I can see how the biographical survey and the extensive theoretical frameworks are intended to be helpful, and Hein has engaged well in particular with Bakhtin. But the degree to which Schmidt's Die Schule der Atheisten is premissed on Cooper's novel is not made clear at all. Nor is a rationale provided for the fact n88 Reviews that none of Schmidt's other carnivalized texts is discussed, most prominently Die Gelehrtenrepublik, Book vn of Zettels Traum with the Jahrmarkt scenes in Scortleben, and Abend mit Goldrand with itsanarchic horde of debauched hippies. Equally problematic is the fact that of the two substantive articles previously published on the topic, by Ellis Shookman ('Lederstrumpf in der Luneburger Heide: Arno Schmidt und J.E Cooper, inZettelkasten 9: Aufsatze und Arbeiten zum Werk Arno Schmidts, ed. by Thomas Krommelbein and Martin Lowsky (Frankfurt a.M.: Bangert & Metzler, 1991), pp. 114-45) and Franziska Schossler ('Der Fetisch Haut ? Coopers Roman Conanchet oder die Beweinte vonWish-ton Wish und Arno Schmidts Erzahlung Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas', inPocahontas Revisited, ed. by Sabine Kyora and Uwe Schwagmeier (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005), pp. 167-92), only Shookman's is ever engaged with (and that only briefly on page 12), although both are referenced in the bibliography. It is a pity thatHein did not make use of Schossler's superb in-depth analysis of race and sexual stereotyping in Coopers Conanchet and Schmidt's Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas (the text inwhich Schmidt comes closest...