Margaret Fuller: Westward to the Lakes, Eastward to Europe
Call for Papers:
Margaret Fuller: Westward to the Lakes, Eastward to Europe
The Margaret Fuller Society invites your participation in the Thoreau Gathering (July 12-16, live in Concord, MA). For this conference, whose major theme is “Thoreau, Politics, and Extinction,” we will consider his colleague Fuller through her public and private record of travel from an original base in New England. Before and after Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she bore witness to transformations in both nature and politics: first of the Midwestern “frontier” in Summer on the Lakes; later, in columns for the New York Tribune, confronting that city’s needs before moving finally to direct witness of Europe amidst revolution . In what ways did she describe and envision transformations toward a millennial future, a cataclysmic collapse, or a conditional position between the two? Did her radical optimism refuse the possibility of extinction? How did she express environmental and social justice concerns or advocate for political change?
These questions are meant to invite many kinds of thematic, comparative, or closely focused studies. Woman in the Nineteenth Century might be a point of reference for papers that also focus on lesser known works, especially those that also challenge the American republic or affirm new roles for women. Just a few examples:
- Fuller’s direct descriptions of natural landscape (Niagara Falls or Scottish Ben Lomond)
- her white gaze upon Indigenous peoples or American encounter with European politics
- her assessment of women’s roles in the American West or the Italian revolution
- her narrative of catastrophic colonial time in relationship to the “vanishing Indian” myth, particularly in dialog with Indigenous writers on the environmental cataclysm of colonization
- her dilemmas of republican or socialist principle in the Italian revolution
- her allegory of the American continent’s “planting” (“What Fits a Man to be a Voter?”) as a racial or racist statement
- her editorials on Pope Pius IX or Giuseppe Mazzini or another individual
- her prospective vision in “Thanksgiving” or “1st January, 1846,” or her final columns as affirmation of the “next revolution”
- late letters about her motherhood and return with her family across the Atlantic
Comparisons with the journalism, travel writing, and diary descriptions of travel by other women writers, as well as applications to present-day issues, are always welcome.
This will be a peer-reviewed panel. Please send one-page proposals and short CVs by December 20 to Phyllis Cole (pbc2@psu.edu). Decisions will be made by early January, and inquiries are welcome at any point. For more information on the Thoreau Gathering, see https://www.thoreausociety.org/event/annual-gathering. To learn about the Fuller Society, visit https://margaretfullersociety.org/.