Date of Completion
2-3-2015
Embargo Period
1-29-2025
Keywords
Margaret Fuller; Conversation; Transcendentalism; First-Wave Feminism; American Literature; Nineteenth Century; Literary Culture; Women's Clubs; New England Women's Club; Women Novelists; Travel Writing; 19th Century Periodical Culture; Spiritualism; Mesmerism; American Literature; Antebellum American Literature; Women's Rights Movement; Anti-Capital Punishment; Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Summer on the Lakes
Major Advisor
Wayne Franklin
Associate Advisor
Anna Mae Duane
Associate Advisor
Veronica Makowsky
Field of Study
English
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Open Access
Open Access
Abstract
Examining “conversation” as a keyword, not only for Margaret Fuller but also for the larger culture, this dissertation works to recover the centrality of Fuller and her work to nineteenth-century American literary and intellectual culture, both during her lifetime and beyond. Despite her death in 1850, Fuller remained a pervasive influence throughout the century, particularly among women. Through her feminist Conversations for women in Boston, Fuller provided an extraordinarily productive model for the post-bellum Women’s Club movement – a portable model that also transitioned into literary texts featuring feminist heroines written by female novelists. Clubwomen and feminist novelists, such as Mary Clemmer Ames, Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, and Louisa May Alcott, responded to the two “great questions” that Fuller had asked and aimed to answer through her Boston Conversations: “What were we born to do?” and “How shall we do it?” Placing her in conversation with a diverse body of thinkers, writers, and reformers, I read her work for the New York Tribune as her entry into national and international conversations by reconstructing some of the journalistic exchanges in which she participated, including conversations about Spiritualism and anti‑capital punishment reform. I also examine Fuller in the role of travel writer, positioning her alongside other women travel writers, including Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Caroline Kirkland, highlighting the importance of the act of travel and, more specifically, writing about travel to a wide variety of women, especially as it contributes to our understanding of the gendered meaning of travel in the nineteenth century.
Recommended Citation
Kornacki, Kathryn A., "Margaret Fuller's Conversations: Self and Other in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Intellectual Culture" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 669.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/669