Margaret Fuller, Critic

Margaret Fuller, Critic provides a representative selection from the rich vein of her writings for the New-York Tribune, where she was the paper's first literary editor. From reviews of the writings of Edgar Allen Poe to reflections on such contemporary French novelists as Balzac and George Sand, from investigations into the relationship between race and voting to arguments for on an asylum for discharged female convicts, the scope of Fuller's critical vision is here made manifest.

Ardent feminist, leader of the transcendentalist movement, participant in the European revolutions of 1848-49, and an inspiration for Zenobia in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance and the caricature Miranda in James Russell Lowell's Fable for Critics, Margaret Fuller was one of the most influential personalities of her day.

Though a plethora of critical writings, biographies, and bibliographies on Fuller have been available—as well as her three published books, European dispatches, and editions of her letters and journals—until now there has been no complete, reliable edition of her writings from the New-York Tribune, where she was the first literary editor. Fuller wrote 250 articles for the Tribune, only 38 of which have been reprinted in modern editions; this book makes this significant portion of her writings available to the public for the first time.

Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson have assembled a selection of Fuller's essays and reviews on American and British literature, music, culture and politics, and art. The accompanying fully annotated, searchable CD-ROM contains all of Fuller's New-York Tribune writings.

Judith Mattson Bean is associate professor of English at Texas Woman's University in Denton and has published numerous articles on Fuller.

Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of South Carolina, has published the standard primary and secondary bibliographies of Fuller. A past president of the Association for Documentary Editing, the Thoreau Society, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, he is currently president of the Margaret Fuller Society.

Elaine Showalter, Princeton University:
Judith Mattson Bean, an English professor at Texas Woman's University in Denton, and Joel Myerson, a professor of American literature at the University of South Carolina, add significantly to the Fuller canon with their selection of more than a hundred articles she wrote as literary editor of the New-York Tribune in the 1840s (all 250 of herTribune articles are included on the CD-ROM that accompanies the book).

Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson have printed a generous selection of Fuller's Tribune aricles, with the complete archive on a CD-ROM tucked into the book's back cover.