Essays on the American Transcendentalist

These essays mark the maturation of scholarship on Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), one of the most important public intellectuals of the nineteenth century and a writer whose works have been much revived in recent decades. The authors--leading scholars of Fuller, Transcendentalism, and the antebellum period--consider anew Fuller the critic, the journalist, the reformer, the traveller, and the social and cultural observer, and make fresh contributions to the study of her life and work. Drawing on developments in gender theory, transatlantic studies, and archival excavations of the networks of reform, this volume defines Fuller as a significant intellectual precursor, a critic who analysed and challenged the dominant interpretive paradigms of her own time and who remains strikingly relevant for ours.