'Ravishing harmony': Defining Risorgimento in Margaret Fuller's dispatches from Italy to the 'New York Tribune', 1847 to 1850

My dissertation, "Ravishing Harmony": Defining the Risorgimento in Margaret Fuller's Dispatches to the New York Tribune (1847-1850), departs from current Fuller scholarship, which heavily emphasizes Fuller's Italian dispatches as Rome-focused. I argue that Fuller assessed the individual cultures and histories of contemporary Italy and searched for a unified Italy as the connection of multiple Italian pasts and their nationalisms, which were, however, contesting and even challenging to national liberation. Second, I argue Fuller's democratic cause of reform is relevant to the first argument I make, that is, her valuing of each city's idea of national liberty and freedom for people within as having as much significance as unification despite that this process was quite a burden to the local city-state and to national rebirth, yet generated the vital liberty of national freedom. As a relevant subject to the two theses, I also argue that Fuller's risorgimento is not gender-neutral; Fuller discussed Italian women's patriotic roles in different city-states via feminine power as a cultural and political agency. I further explored how Fuller places women's role in national liberation as contesting for democracy as much as the feminist critic of the "chartered power," her life-long battle, for constituting women's equal political, economic and social power in defining their national existence in Italy. In developing these theses, I applied Fuller's idea of "ravishing harmony" as the overarching theme of her understanding of the Risorgimento, the question she put in 1843 - what is nation? - the central theme of "The Great Lawsuit."...