Cosmos and Colonialism

Ranging from his own time to the 21st century, 50 essays and excerpts demonstrate the wide variety of responses to German travel writer Humboldt (1769-1859), especially controversy over his accounts of the Americas during the 19th century. Among the authors are Friedrich Schiller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, Henry James, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ernst Bloch. The primary sources could be useful to scholars of German history and culture, European intellectual history, colonialism and the Americas, and other fields. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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 Universitat Berlin and the University of Illinois in Urbana, 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 Universitat Bern in Switzerland. Previously, he was Junior Professor of Rhetoric at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature and the Cluster of Excellence "Languages of Emotion" at the Freie Universitat Berlin. He (co-)edited Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos and the first German publication of Vues des Cordilleres (2004), the Chimborazo Diary (2006), the ethnographic and political essays as well as Central Asia (2009). Lubrich's Travels in the Reich, 1933–45 was published by the University of Chicago Press (2010).