Abstracts
Abstract
In her travel narrative Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Margaret Fuller differentiates consistently between the materialistic or utilitarian motivations of settlers, on one hand, and the spiritual or aesthetic aims of tourists on the other. Her trip occurred during the depths of the severe economic crisis of 1837 to 1844, a period of widespread questioning of the historical progressiveness of capitalism. Many among Fuller’s circle of radical bourgeois Bostonians felt that the world had been badly deformed by what they called “the spirit of commerce”, and they worried that New England was developing what Thomas Carlyle diagnosed as the “Condition-of-England.” This romantic assessment of socio-economic pathologies focused on the idea that a materialist, instrumentalist, and rationalist civilization had lost touch with the organic “laws of nature.” Summer on the Lakes, then, is structured by the tension between a vision of a just society rooted in nature and the stark reality of America’s westward expansion, between an abiding faith in the human potential to live up to the beauty of picturesque landscapes and a clear understanding of the cold social calculus of immediate profit.
Appendices
Works Cited
- Adams, Stephen. ""That Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman": Fuller's Summer on the Lakes and Romantic Aesthetics." Studies in the American Renaissance. (1987): 247-64.
- Allen, Margaret V. The Achievement of Margaret Fuller. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979.
- ———. "The Political and Social Criticism of Margaret Fuller." South Atlantic Quarterly 72 (1973): 560-73.
- Baker, Anne. "'A Commanding View': Vision and the Problem of Nationality in Fuller's Summer on the Lakes." ESQ 44.1-2 (1998).
- Baker, Dorothy. "Excising the Text, Exorcising the Author: Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes in 1843." In Her Own Voice: Nineteenth-Century American Woman Essayists. New York: Garland, 1997. 97-112.
- Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. New York: Dutton, 1936.
- Brownson, Orestes. "Review of Summer on the Lakes in 1843." Brownson's Quarterly Review 6 (1844): 546-47.
- Capper, Charles. "Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston." American Quarterly 39.4 (1987).
- Carlyle, Thomas. Selected Writings. Ed. Alan Shelston. London: Penguin, 1971.
- Chevigny, Bell Gale. "The Edges of Ideology: Margaret Fuller's Centrifugal Evolution." American Quarterly 38.2 (1986).
- ———. "The Long Arm of Censorship: Myth-Making in Margaret Fuller's Time and Our Own." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2.2 (1976): 450-60.
- Clarke, James Freeman. "Review of Summer on the Lakes in 1843." Critical Essays on Margaret Fuller. Joel Myerson, ed. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.
- Cole, Phyllis Blum. "The American Writer and the Condition of England, 1815-1860." Ph.D. Thesis. Harvard University, 1973.
- Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Robert N. Hudspeth, ed. 6 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983-1995.
- ———. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Ed. Susan Belasco Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
- Gustafson, Sandra M. "Choosing a Medium: Margaret Fuller and the Forms of Sentiment." American Quarterly 47.1 (1995).
- Haronian, Mary-Jo. "Margaret Fuller's Visions." ESQ 44.1-2 (1998).
- Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. American Men and Women of Letters Series. Reprint of New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1884 ed. New York: The Confucian Press, 1980.
- Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
- Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International, 1947.
- Miller, Perry. Margaret Fuller: American Romantic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963.
- Noe, Marcia. "The Heathen Priestess on the Prairie: Margaret Fuller Constructs the Midwest." The Old Northwest 16.1 (1992): 3-12.
- Putz, Manfred. ""Dissenting Voices of Consent: Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Fourth of July." The Fourth of July: Political Oratory and Literary Reactions, 1776-1876. Ed. Paul Goetsch and Gerd Hurm. Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1992. 167-84.
- Rosowski, Susan J. "Margaret Fuller, an Engendered West, and Summer on the Lakes." Western American Literature 25.2 (1990): 125-44.
- Smith, Susan Belasco. "Introduction." Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
- ———. "Summer on the Lakes: Margaret Fuller and the British." Resources for American Literary Study 17.2 (1991): 191-207.
- Steele, Jeffrey. "Introduction." The Essential Margaret Fuller. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
- Stowe, William W. "Conventions and Voices in Margaret Fuller's Travel Writing." American Literature 63.2 (1991): 242-62.
- Tonkovich, Nicole. "Traveling in the West, Writing in the Library: Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes." Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 10.2 (1993): 79-102.
- Zwarg, Christina. Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading. Reading Women Writing Series. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.