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Transatlantic Echoes

Alexander von Humboldt in World Literature

Rex Clark editor Oliver Lubrich editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Berghahn Books

Published:1st Apr '12

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Transatlantic Echoes cover

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.

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

ISBN: 9780857452658

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 762g

480 pages