News and Events
Events
Upcoming Talk by Meredith McGill: "West of Poetry: Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes"
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: 311 Denney Hall
About Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes:
In 1843, Margaret Fuller, already a well-established figure in the Transcendental circle of Emerson and Thoreau, traveled by train, steamboat, carriage, and on foot to make a tour of the Great Lakes. Summer on the Lakes was the product of Margaret Fuller's journey through what was considered the far western frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America. It is, at least in part, an intensely personal account of Fuller's own inner life during the summer of 1843. She shared with the Transcendentalists the belief that internal travel--what Emerson called travel within the mind--was the most significant kind of journey. Her travel away from New England to visit such places as Niagara Falls, Mackinac Island, and Rock River, Illinois, is symbolic of a larger journey that Fuller was making in her mind: her departure from Emersonian idealism and her subsequent revision of Transcendentalism. The result is a particularly rich form of autobiography. Summer on the Lakes occupies a pivotal position in Margaret Fuller's development as a writer, a Transcendentalist, and a feminist. (taken from http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/95ekm6mb9780252061646.html)
Meredith McGill is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, where she is also the Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis. Dr. McGill is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (2003) and the editor of a recent collection of essays, The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008). She is currently working on a study of the circulation of poetry in the antebellum United States. Her research interests include the history of the book in American culture, American poetry and poetics, law and literature, literary theory, new media and the history of media shift.
