Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

WorkPlutarch

Lives

Lives Inferred

Plutarch (c. 46 CE–after 119 CE)

InferredFuller names Brutus as an exemplar, not a book; the identification with Plutarch’s Lives rests on Plutarch’s life of Brutus as the standard classical account.

Mentioned

Documented 1846

Books

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York
VI. Europe1record
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850
1846—

The Modern Drama

“The Modern Drama”
mentioned
“His confidence is not noble to us, it is not that of Brutus or Van Artevelde, who, knowing what is prescribed by the law of right within the breast, can take no other course but that, whatever the consequences; neither like the faith of Julius Caesar or Wallenstein in their star, which, though less pure, is not without religion; but it is the presumption of a strong character which, though its head towers above those of its companions when they are on the same level, yet has not taken a sufficiently high platform, to see what passes around or above it.”

Fuller, Margaret. Papers on Literature and Art. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846. · p153

Inferred Fuller names Brutus as an exemplar, not a book; the identification with Plutarch’s Lives rests on Plutarch’s life of Brutus as the standard classical account.

Also printed in Art, Literature, and the Drama (1869), p153; page given is to the 1869 reprint.