Margaret Fuller's legacy : gender, voice, and authority /
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| Other Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
1992.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Link to OAKTrust copy |
| Abstract: | This dissertation describes the literary impact of Margaret Fuller on nineteenth-century men and women writers. Fuller was a public speaker and a literary and social critic whose relationships with her contemporaries stimulated their careers and influenced their works. Fuller's literary relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson was complicated by nineteenth-century gender expectations for styles of discourse and friendship. An examination of letters and journals discloses Fuller's importance to Emerson's creative process. Fuller's public speaking in her Conversations stimulated a tradition of literary and social criticism in writing and lecturing. At least five women writer-speakers were inspired by her work and contributed to the Fuller legacy by writing and lecturing about her. Julia Ward Howe followed the Fuller tradition in her essays and lectures. Caroline Healey Dali, Mary Livermore, Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Ednah Dow Cheney emulated Fuller's outspoken discourse. Together these women helped create a female tradition of social prophecy. Emerson, Howe and others preserved Fuller's memory partly through the image of sibyl, one of several representations of eloquent women. An examination of the self-presentations of women speakers clarifies the importance of the sibyl and prophetess images to traditions of women speaking and writing in antebellum America. These self-presentations contrast with representations of women speakers in the fiction which encodes the challenge to conventional femininity that Fuller and women public speakers posed to their culture. Characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Louisa May Alcott's Moods, based in part on Fuller, recreate her voice in imaginative ways that illuminate Fuller's effect on her contemporaries. |
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| Item Description: | Typescript (photocopy). Vita. "Major subject: English." |
| Physical Description: | vi, 308 leaves ; 29 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references. |