Voltairine de Cleyre's transnational anarchism
ISBN: 9781526177063
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Year first published: 01 Jun 2026
Pages: 264
Format: Hardback
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.