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Transatlantic Echoes
Alexander von Humboldt in World Literature
Edited by Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich
480 pages, 42 ills, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-0-85745-265-8 $179.00/£132.00 / Hb / Published (April 2012)
Reviews
“There is no doubt that these volumes combine the most comprehensive collection of texts for the colorful and shifting history of Humboldt's fame...By laboriously assembling, and in many cases translating, an impressive number of texts from remote corners of libraries and collections, Clark and Lubrich have provided a valuable service to scholars and the general public. In this process they have filled a neglected space in the literature about Humboldt. They have pointed to the issues of colonialism and integrated Latin American voices and into the dialogue about Humboldt, a dialogue that concerns primarily Latin America. the world that Humboldt treated so exhaustively in histwenty-nine volumes. “ · Yearbook of German-American Studies
Description
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a world traveler, bestselling writer, and versatile researcher, a European salon sensation, and global celebrity. Yet the enormous literary echo he generated has remained largely unexplored. Humboldt inspired generations of authors, from Goethe and Byron to Enzensberger and García Márquez, to reflect on cultural difference, colonial ideology, and the relation between aesthetics and science. This collection of one-hundred texts features tales of adventure, travel reports, novellas, memoirs, letters, poetry, drama, screenplays, and even comics—many for the first time in English. The selection covers the foundational myths and magical realism of Latin America, the intellectual independence of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman in the United States, discourses in Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, East, and West Germany, as well as recent films and fiction. This documented source book addresses scholars in cultural and postcolonial studies as well as readers in history and comparative literature.
Rex Clark is a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, researching the history of travel guides and travel discourse in the eighteenth century and focusing on Friedrich Nicolai, Georg Forster, and Alexander von Humboldt. He has published articles on digital media, postcolonial travel theory, and the reception of Alexander von Humboldt.
Oliver Lubrich is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Universität Bern in Switzerland. He is the author of Shakespeare's Self-Deconstruction (2001) and Post-Colonial Poetics (2004, 2009) and the editor of Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945 (2010). He has edited or co-edited Alexander von Humboldt's Central Asia (2009), Kosmos (2004), and the first German version of Vues des Cordillères (2004), the Chimborazo Diary (2006) as well as the ethnographic and political essays (2009, 2010).
Also edited by Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich: Cosmos and Colonialism: Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism
Subject: History (General)Cultural Studies (General)Literary Studies
Area: Latin America and the CaribbeanEurope
Contents
Of Related Interest
Constructing Charisma
Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe
