Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2: The Public Years - Hardcover

Capper, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195063139 ISBN 13: 9780195063134

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Capper is Professor of History at Boston University. In addition to writing the acclaimed first volume of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, he is coeditor of The American Intellectual Tradition and the journal Modern Intellectual History.

Review:

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0195063139
• ISBN 13: 9780195063134
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672