Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years by Charles Capper
Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years by Charles Capper
English | Feb 8, 2010 | ISBN: 0195396324, 0195063139 | 688 Pages | PDF | 5,4 MB
English | Feb 8, 2010 | ISBN: 0195396324, 0195063139 | 688 Pages | PDF | 5,4 MB
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In Volume II, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years" focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This long-awaited second volume of Capper's Bancroft Prize–winning biography of Fuller fulfills all expectations. Capper follows Fuller's increasing literary fame and her travels to the American West and to Europe; he also recovers her thinking on topics ranging from religion to "the woman question." Fuller emerges as a proto-modernist, someone who "managed to slip more completely than any other intellectual of her generation the leash of Victorian repressions and evasions." Fuller articulated a radically Transcendental critique of classical Christianity, arguing that if men and women did not interpret the Bible "by the freedom of their own souls," they would render the Bible untrue. Capper offers a nuanced and sophisticated reading of Fuller's tracts on gender, which he says have important philosophical and literary qualities. He treats Fuller's personal life as well, chronicling her struggles with finances, her relationship with Emerson and her affair with an Italian partisan 10 years her junior. Debate has raged for 150 years about whether Fuller and Giovanni Angelo Ossoli actually married or whether their son was illegitimate. Capper cautiously concludes that they likely did marry in 1848. Capper has crafted both an intimate life and a subtle analysis of Fuller's work. 36 b&w illus. (May)
"Superb."-Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books
"With this second volume, Capper has established his preeminent position as the authority on Fuller….This is a triumph of great intellectual achievement, displaying an amazing depth of knowledge and admirable research." -Sally G. McMillen, Reviews in American History
"Capper's book makes us see that Fuller was finally not a romantic heroine but a historical creature, endowed with extraordinary capacities for making a place for herself…. Charles Capper finally brings Margaret Fuller back home, reclaiming her and her immense intelligence for America."-Christine Stansell, The New Republic
"This long-awaited second volume of Capper's Bancroft Prize-winning biography of Fuller fulfills all expectations …. Capper has crafted both an intimate life and a subtle analysis of Fuller's work." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Capper's magnificent biography restores Fuller as a transnational citizen of the liberal Atlantic world and as the first great American champion of cosmopolitan avant-garde culture." -Mary Loeffelholz, Boston Globe
"Our understanding of one of the most original and consequential 'men of letters' in 19th-century America–this country's first modern feminist–is as complete as the art of biography allows."-The Atlantic
"Charles Capper does not simply know about Margaret Fuller; he knows Fuller herself -her mind and heart, her hopes and fears. This biography is a monument to both its brilliant subject and her sensitive, perceptive biographer." -Daniel Walker Howe, author of What Hath God Wrought
"A triumph. A revolutionary, a feminist, an intellectual, a wife and a mother, Margaret Fuller lived a rich full life. This is a rich full account of it, easily the best life of Fuller ever written." -Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire
"A tour de force."-Mary Kelley, University of Michigan
"Will undoubtedly stand for generations to come as the authoritative biography of one of this nation's most important, influential women intellectuals." -Lawrence Buell, Harvard University
"This portrait of Fuller as a feminist and cosmopolitan cultural figure has been highly praised by historians."–New York Times Book Review