Overview

Despite a growing interest in her life and work, Voltairine de Cleyre's contribution to anarchist studies, women studies, and American literature is still mostly unacknowledged. Described by Emma Goldman as 'the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced', de Cleyre authored poems, prose sketches, lectures and translations which radiate with her vision of the world, meticulous use of language, and iconoclastic vigour. Drawing on her copious correspondence with family members, friends and comrades, this monograph provides novel insight into the most significant events of her life while investigating the aesthetic concern characterising all of her writing. Constantly shifting across languages, she established cosmopolitan networks within immigrant communities at home and beyond the ocean, always believing, until her untimely death, in universal solidarity and the ultimate non-existence of national, ethnic and linguistic barriers.

Full Product Details

9781526177063

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Reviews

We have never really understood her: even sympathetic writers have misrepresented Voltairine de Cleyre. Was she a self-denying martyr or a Nietzschean egoist? Mired in the nineteenth century, or in advance of her time? Rita Filanti takes on the challenge of representing this anarchist-feminist forerunner in all her complexity, situating her in the transatlantic political networks of her time and place. A frustrating, a fascinating figure, de Cleyre has never been given such a full assessment as here. Prof. Jesse Cohn, author of Underground Passages: Anarchist resistance culture 1848-2011 Focusing on de Cleyre’s work as translator, educator and poet, Rita Filanti offers a rich new appreciation of de Cleyre’s anarchism as grounded in the radical traditions of the American transcendentalists, Quakers, and early abolitionists. Filanti’s discussion of de Cleyre’s poetry is fresh and thrilling, showing how her engagement with language upends “the fetish of monolingualism” to celebrate hybrid encounters between equals. Prof. Kathy E Ferguson, author of Letterpress Revolution and Emma Goldman: Political thinking in the streets -- .

Author Information

Rita Filanti, PhD, is an Independent Scholar based in Bari, Italy.

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