The enigma of Margaret Fuller : romantic, realist, or something "a little beyond"? /
This dissertation examines the intellectual and philosophical development of Margaret Fuller, attempting to better understand her life and work by following her own Romantic critical imperative to meet a poet "on his own ground." The first chapter considers the rigors of Fuller's ear...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
2000.
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| Online Access: | http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=728323061&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=2945&RQT=309&VName=PQD |
| Summary: | This dissertation examines the intellectual and philosophical development of Margaret Fuller, attempting to better understand her life and work by following her own Romantic critical imperative to meet a poet "on his own ground." The first chapter considers the rigors of Fuller's early education in the context of its antebellum-American milieu and in terms of the driving force of her father, Timothy Fuller, with his focus on family, morality, and discipline. The study appraises Fuller's intellectual accomplishments in light of the writer's own adult estimations of that education and her father in the Memoirs. The second chapter explores the impetus to self-culture, an intense program of study in languages, literature, history, and religion, which oftentimes pitted the classical thinking of her father against the Romantic world view in her readings. Predominant figures include Carlyle and Jefferson, as well as, more personally, the young Unitarian ministers James Freeman Clarke and Frederic Henry Hedge. Goethe emerges as a significant influence, inspiring Fuller to seek harmony between thought and action-or the ideal and the real-a search that characterizes all of her adult work. The third chapter investigates Fuller's relationship with Emerson and concomitant interaction with American Transcendentalism. This affiliation affected Fuller's career roles, as teacher, translator, and editor, for instance, and it also influenced the literary and social criticism she began writing in the mid-1830s, with its accent on educating the "American mind" toward individual and, thence, social reform. Philosophically, Fuller's polemical thinking about the balance between thought and action manifests a more spiritual dimension when blended with the Emersonian emphasis on higher aim. The final two chapters interpret Fuller's intellectual and philosophical development in terms of her major works, Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and then in regard to her critical writings in New York and Europe for Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune. Even in the most highly politicized of her writings toward the end of her life, Margaret Fuller continues to promulgate for America the promise of both the ideal and the real, as well as a "higher standard in thought and action." |
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| Item Description: | Vita. "Major Subject: English". |
| Physical Description: | x, 335 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilm Inc. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 324-333). |