Forty Years with Margaret Fuller

Abstract

Mutual interpretation – one of Margaret Fuller’s signature values – has marked the history of her reception ever since her revival in the 1970s. In these forty years, Fuller scholarship has kept pace with – or led – emerging trends in feminism, literary theory, and ways of delineating fields of study. I sometimes fancy that she and I are a double helix spiraling around these lively years. This period has dynamically altered the figure Fuller cuts and has changed my political and intellectual life as well. My forty-year love affair with Margaret Fuller has often been broken off, but it fires up again as she reappears – or I seek her – in new guise.