This final volume in the four-volume series Habits of Being shows how the dialectic between everyday appearance and outrageous acts is mediated through clothing and accessories. It considers how clothing and accessories can move quickly from the ordinary to the extravagant. Employing many different approaches, these essays explore how wearing an object-a crown, a flower, an earring, a corsage, a veil, even a length of material-can stray beyond the bounds of the body on which it is placed into the discrepant territory of flagrantly excessive public signs of love, status, honor, prestige, power, desire, and display. The varied contributions of scholars (historians, ethnographers, literary and film critics) and artists (photographers, sculptors, writers, weavers, and embroiderers) take up the threads of these forays into history, psyche, and aesthetics in surprising and useful ways. With examples from around the world, contributors address how the simple action of ornamenting the body, even with something as common as a button, are open to elaborate interpretations-which themselves offer new understandings of human behavior and artistic endeavor. When our "habits of being" receive close scrutiny, they seem anything but habitual. Contributors: Mariapia Bobbiobi; Camilla Cattarulla, U of Rome Three; Paola Colaiacomo, Sapienza, U of Rome; Maria Damon, Pratt Institute of Art; Joanne B. Eicher, U of Minnesota; Maria Giulia Fabi, U of Ferrara; Margherita di Fazio; Adeena Karasick, Fordham U; Tarrah Krajnak, Pitzer College; Charlotte Nekola, William Paterson U; Victoria R. Pass, Maryland Institute College of Art; Amanda Salvioni, U of Macerata; Maria Anita Stefanelli, U of Rome Three.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), a pioneering gender theorist, transcendentalist, journalist, and literary critic, was one of the most well-known and highly regarded feminist intellectuals of nineteenth-century America. With her contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she was one of the predominant writers of the Transcendentalist movement, and she aligned herself in both her public and private life with the European revolutionary fervor of the 1840s. She traveled to Italy as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune to cover the nascent revolutions, pursuing the transnational ideal awakened in her youth by a classical education in European languages and a Romantic curiosity about other cultures, traditions, and identities.
This volume is a collaboration of international scholars who, from varied fields and approaches, assess Fuller's genius and character. Treating the last several years of Margaret Fuller's short life, these essays offer a truly international discussion of Fuller's unique cultural, political, and personal achievements. From the origins and articulations of Fuller's cosmopolitanism to her examination of "the woman question," and from her fascination with the European "other" to her candid perception of imperial America from abroad, they ponder what such an extraordinary woman meant to America, and also to Italy and Europe, during her lifetime and continuing to the present.

Clothing may not make the man (or woman), but it helps. How clothing as a vestige and artifact and as transmitter of identity moves from one use to another, from one fantasy to another fad, from one literary source to another visual one: these are the concerns of the essays in this volume. The second in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Exchanging Clothes focuses on the concept of transnational "circulation and exchange"-not only the global exchange of material commodities across time and space but also of the ideas, images, colors, and textures related to fashion. Essays examine the parade of heroes past, from Homer and Virgil to Dante and Ariosto, wearing armor or nothing; the social power of a tie or of a safety pin sprung from punk fashion to the red carpet; a Midwestern thrift store, from cheap labor to cheap purchase, as a microcosm of global circulation; and lesbian pulp fiction as how-to-dress manuals. Whether looking at Kate Chopin's silk stockings, Nellie Bly's capacious bag, Audrey Hepburn's cross-Atlantic travels, rings in James Merrill's poetry, or feminine ornaments in Algeria, these essays offer an ever-expanding vision of how fashion moves through culture and the economy, reflecting and determining identity at every stage and turn of the transaction. Contributors: Nello Barile, IULM U, Milan; Vittoria C. Caratozzolo, Sapienza, U of Rome; Alisia Grace Chase, SUNY, Brockport; Chafika Dib-Marouf, Jules Verne U, Picardie; Anne Hollander; Mariuccia Mandelli (Krizia); Andrea Mariani, Gabriele d'Annunzio U, Chieti-Pescara; Katalin Medvedev, U of Georgia; Laura Montani; Karen Reimer; Cristina Scatamacchia, U of Perugia.