Transatlantic Echoes

<p> 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.</p>