The University of Wisconsin Press


American Studies / History / Women's Studies

Margaret Fuller
Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age
Edited by Charles Capper and Cristina Giorcelli
Foreword by Lester K. Little

Studies in American Thought and Culture


An illuminating examination of Margaret Fuller's reflections on America from abroad

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), a pioneering gender theorist, transcendentalist, journalist, and literary critic, was one of the most well-known and highly regarded feminist intellectuals of nineteenth-century America. With her contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she was one of the predominant writers of the Transcendentalist movement, and she aligned herself in both her public and private life with the European revolutionary fervor of the 1840s. She traveled to Italy as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune to cover the nascent revolutions, pursuing the transnational ideal awakened in her youth by a classical education in European languages and a Romantic curiosity about other cultures, traditions, and identities.

This volume is a collaboration of international scholars who, from varied fields and approaches, assess Fuller's genius and character. Treating the last several years of Margaret Fuller's short life, these essays offer a truly international discussion of Fuller's unique cultural, political, and personal achievements. From the origins and articulations of Fuller's cosmopolitanism to her examination of "the woman question," and from her fascination with the European "other" to her candid perception of imperial America from abroad, they ponder what such an extraordinary woman meant to America, and also to Italy and Europe, during her lifetime and continuing to the present.

"Wide-ranging and ambitious, this collection includes many of the best Fuller scholars as well as some new voices. It succeeds admirably as it moves from extreme closeups focusing on the dramatic historical events of 1848–49 to panoramic vistas that link Fuller to trans- national cultural concerns."–Jeffrey Steele, editor of The Essential Margaret Fuller

Contributors: Charles Capper, Bell Gale Chevigny, Cristina Giorcelli, Francesco Guida, Robert N. Hudspeth, Lester K. Little, Larry J. Reynolds, John Paul Russo, Anna Scacchi, Joseph C. Schöpp, Maria Anita Stefanelli, and Donato Tamblé

Charles Capper is professor of history at Boston University and author of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Volume 1, The Private Years, and Volume 2, The Public Years. He is coeditor of The American Intellectual Tradition and the journal Modern Intellectual History.

Studies in American Thought and Culture
Paul Boyer, Series Editor


Cristina Giorcelli is professor of American literature at the University of Rome Three and has published extensively on nineteenth-century fiction and on Modernist poetry. She cofounded and codirects the quarterly journal Letterature d'America.

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Of Related Interest
Collected Poems
With Notes Toward the Memoirs
Djuna Barnes
Selected and edited by Phillip Herring and Osías Stutman

the cover of Capper's book features a full-cover photo of huge, ship-sinking ocean waves.

January 2008
LC: 2007011771 PS
288 pp.  6 x 9

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Cloth $29.95 s
ISBN 978-0-299-22340-3
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