ABSTRACT
Margaret Fuller's desire to think of American literature as multilingual is resurging as scholars increasingly regard the scope of American studies as transnational. For Fuller, cultural identity was not solipsistically original but intimately relational, and translation was the linguistic equivalent of that contingency. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller staged multilingual translation to develop her model for gender equity. Fuller developed this alternative vision of translation in response to theoretical challenges from Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose understanding of universality she wished to question, and as an alternative to a politics of othering. Fuller's interest in continental translation theory challenged her to develop a model of empirical translation that protected national diversity and literary globalism from homogenizing universality. Despite her pessimism about a peaceful resolution to frontier relations, Fuller uses translation to allow the cultures of immigrants and natives to coexist in a way that refuses any simple definition of Anglo-American literature.
